NavList:

David, you wrote:
"The current bids are much lower than I thought they would be!"

They start low and go higher! I have experimented with pricing in the past few months. Low starting prices for auctions still work well. This used to be the standard practice: you could open an auction for an item worth $5,000 with an initial bid of $1 and just watch the fun. As ebay auctions have become somewhat less "liquid" that has become less common, but in my small recent experience, it does work.

You also wrote:
"I note that the seller may not ship the two books to New Zealand. Can you please clarify."

Yeah, this is a damn pain in the neck on ebay. They offer an easy way to set shipping choices for Australia, but there's no similar checkbox for New Zealand. The only alternative seems to be to allow bidding from all of "Asia", which I am disinclined to do (because of a very few countries with known poor buyer behavior). In this instance, I even tried to gamble and make that change, but I just discovered that ebay does not permit changes to shipping options after bids have been made --for no logical reason that I can think of.

As a "consolation prize", just a reminder that we (the NavList community) have a list of historical navigation books available online here:
http://fer3.com/arc/navbooks2.html. There are some Nories in there...

Frank Reed