The Tid Bit News Stand -- where this comic was sold in early 1942 -- is somewhere down the righthand side of the street in this 1943 photo. You could also buy tokens there!

Recommend u just conserve and leaf-cast this GA Superman. Too much labor to do in-painting unless u want the practice during X-mas break.

Still not sure whether to just go for "conserved," but decided to start the rescue mission anyway. Dry-cleaned the cover to a reasonable degree without risking color loss (great scot, what a lot of grime!), and then leaf-cast it. Will need a pressing before any next steps. And still need to do the interior wraps, which will take some time...

Cool project! I think you should feel free to restore/conserve/what-have-you without regret. The book was a straight-up .5 to begin with -- any degree of conservation work can only improve it.

looks great last picture compared to the first

Recreating missing interior text, advertisements, graphics and photos is very challenging. Here, it took awhile to even find a suitable reference copy (in the early days of DC/National, the lineup of titles and their publishing schedule was changing all the time, so the details of inside-front cover house ads differed issue to issue). Also had to contend with reddish staining that was already in the area of the missing text, so the restored material was sympathetic to that, but perhaps too much so -- will need to try to improve the color match there before we're finished...

Well, that escalated quickly! Let me start by acknowledging this has turned into a rather extreme restoration, and I realize there are differing opinions on such things. I started out wondering, myself, whether to just conserve it. But, honestly, this was a completely trashed .5, so in the end it wasn’t a close call for me. I decided to just go for it. The cover is not finished, but I’m focusing now on leafcasting every interior wrap to fill missing paper and inpaint any lost art. 

Newly leaf-cast interior wraps waiting to be inpainted…