AJD

"Excelsior true believers"

This has probably been posted before in this thread (I assume nobody is keeping track any more?) but WTH.

I have all of the Barks Four Colors other than #s 9 and 29 but I also pick up the issues with Barks covers over other stories when I get a chance. This one was going cheap enough to not be able to resist it. It came out of a PLOD 8.0 slab with a "very small amount of colour touch on cover". The CT is not at all obvious in hand and I reckon I'd have missed it had I bought the book raw. I think I see it in the scan on the spine near Donald's cap and butt, but I still struggle to see it in hand, even under a magnifier lamp. In any case it doesn't matter - it's a very nice looking book and I'm happy at the price. The GCD credits Frank McSavage with the cover story, who I know nothing about. It's not terrible, but the Scrooge in this tale is well off Bark's model sheet (both in looks and character) and Donald is a pretty one dimensional manipulator. HD&L are at least sympathetic characters towards the end of the story. Here are some sample pages.

In. Please and thank you.

Your copy of Starting 52 to my copy of Startling 52

Let's have an impromptu LTMM 20 club! (love that book)

Just for fun, here's a two page filler story by Paul Wheelahan from Jumbo Comics #3. Life on Saturn... a "boiling planet so close to the heat of the sun"!!!

A few comments, not so much for your low value book but in general for taping. (Caveat: I'm an interested amateur in paper conservation, not a pro.) As a general principle, anything you do a document should be as reversible as possible. Not all archival tapes are created equal and there's a reason that the price varies so widely. The cheap ones in Officeworks are likely to give poorer outcomes. If you are going to tape a completely split cover, tape it lengthwise alone the spine, the way Point Five suggests. The reason it split is that it's brittle, and trying to do 'less harm' by using smaller pieces at odd points could lead to more tearing during handling where the strong tape meets the weak paper. Any form of adhesive tape, archival or otherwise, bonds the adhesive to the paper, which complicates removal later and would probably require solvents other than water. (See the detailed explanation here.) Even good archival tapes can be a pain to remove. Archive quality Japan paper and paste is always water soluble and is a preferable approach to sealing tears and reinforcing spines.