buttock

Richard Muchin, way back when, had a good process for this. You determine if you'd rather have the same book in VG, FN, etc., and if you'd prefer the book with a single defect over a FN but less than a F/VF, then it's a FN+. It isn't scientific, but it makes a lot of sense.

No. A million times, no.

Dang

Uhhh....

Ho. Ly. Cow.

You'd be surprised!

Very very difficult book to find

Great catch!

Most of the purple above Iceman's hand is color touched. The top left corner is infilled and color touched. Most of the white on the free edge is color touched. The top is probably trimmed, possibly the right edge also. Hard to say much more without seeing it.

Both look to have amateur restoration. The #1 definitely, the #2 likely.

Highlights of the year for me.

Commie!

Thanks for doing this! I won the 5 for completeness' sake.

I can't see all of them, so feel free to add as necessary. These are the ones I had in my watch list. 1 9.4 - 108,666 2 - 9.4 - 40,222 3 - 9.4 12,850 5 - 9.2 - 16,866 6 - 9.0 - 7,969 7 - 9.6 - 10,000 8 - 9.8 - 25,401 9 - 9.6 - 10,700 10 - 9.6- 14,866 13 - 9.4 - 18,200 14 - 9.4 - 20,500 17 - 9.4 - 18,200 18 - 9.4 - 19,200 19 - 9.6 - 19,100 22 - 9.2 - 6,477 Overall, I think most went for a reasonable price. I did have some concern that one person might try to get the whole run like the Peps a while back. The 13 & 14 could have gone higher, those have gained recognition for their scarcity. I was happy that the 5 didn't go higher, I could have easily seen it going nuts as there isn't another HG copy with great colors except for the Larson, and that isn't going anywhere. The 7 seemed very reasonable. The chunk out of the corner of the 6 really kept it down. Is there a true HG copy out there?

Who's down for a recap?

(ꈍᴗꈍ)ε｀*)

Right. Different retailers had different ways to manage it. I'm sure some kept ledgers. But when it's something that's seen over and over and over and over again, it's not very logical to try to say that in this single instance it's something different.

So the fact that many newsstands were using some coding system and date stamps/written dates to assist with returns doesn't make you think that the simplest explanation is that the retailer in Denver was doing the same thing as many of his peers? D copies San Franciscos (G code for Gilboy) Salidas Green Rivers Larsons (ON, PN codes) Auroras Ohios Plenty of examples of return codes.

Why would the newsstand bother to code the books if he was going to set them aside and they were already sold? The bottom line is that we're all speculating about it (the one that I struggle with is the idea that the extra number references the number of that issue received by the newsstand, it's certainly possible, but no way to know for sure), but Occam's razor applies and making things more complicated with hypotheses that don't make sense seems silly.

The reason that vendors put distributor codes on books was so that they would know which distributor they should return the books to in case of a non-sale. I never said they were designated for returns. The point that I'm making is that the fact that they had distributor codes written on them means that they had already made it to the newsstand, so they would not have been obtained directly from the distributor. That's flat out wrong.

Given that the codes on the books were written by the vendor for returns to the distributor, I don't think we should assume he was getting copies from the distributor.

I can smell this picture.

Great looking 6.0

Exceptional colors on the Fight!

John Verzyl was a big buyer of Church books from HA. It's not unlikely that these are from his inventory.