baggsey

Well, @themagicrobot, work is well underway on Comics Unlimited #54. It will be a print-only edition, available via Amazon at cost (it's a non-profit exercise). It is intended as a one-off memorial issue. My pal Nigel Brown will explain the background to it in the editorial. We've managed to identify a lot of the old contributors who have graciously contributed to the contents. I'll post an update over on the SuperStuff blog soon, which we'll pass on to John Freeman at Down The Tubes as well. Re the Fantasy Unlimited and Comics Unlimited scans over on Dave Hathway-Price's site....I believe that he has the vast majority of the issues scanned, but cleaning up the pages digitally is a time-consuming chore without a doubt. His site is a fabulous resource ; if there was a way that Google could index the contents, it would be even more valuable.

Re the recent re-opening of the discussion about distribution numbers by @themagicrobot , @Malacoda et al, has anyone done a deep dive on the distribution data held by the Alliance of Audited Media here in the US? I learned of its existence in a post on the Doc Savage Flearun, where someone had been using the archive to determine Doc Savage pulp distribution numbers back in the 1930s and 1940s. It can be found at https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/circulating/ . The archive overview states: "The Circulating American Magazines Project addresses the critical absence of reliable circulation information by digitizing data publishers submitted to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (A.B.C.), building a robust database of circulation data covering the period 1919 to 1972. This data was extracted from the A.B.C. Blue Book, Periodical Publisher’s Statements, copies of which are held at a handful of research institutions and the archive of the Alliance of Audited Media. " I took a quick look at the site and on first view the comic-related data is probably insufficiently granular to yield any new insights for us comic chums, nor tell us how many comics went to T&P, but it's certainly worth a look.

How about comics destined for Ireland? According to Wikipedia, although Eire decimalized along with the UK in 1971, the old shilling coin was kept in circulation until 1993. @Malacoda - did T&P have a distribution centre in Ireland. If we have any Irish lurkers on this forum, perhaps they can confirm if the stamp is familiar?

I still live in hope that a T&P stamped copy of Detective 272 turns up. As I previously related, I did have a copy back in the 70's. It had a tear in the cover and a taped spine, according to my notes.

Looks like Mick Anglo did the spot illustrations for both the Batman and Superman text stories, as well as editing the magazine. I wonder if Douglas Enefer wrote the Batman text story, as he had done for the eleven issues of the Batman digest from World Distributors in the summer of 1967.

Fake! Happy New Year!

The first example below of the first Strato entry from the 1958 London phone Directory, which has two different phone numbers at different (adjacent?) exchanges (Hyde Pk and Mayfair). Perhaps one of the phone numbers is for a rep's home and the other is a physical office? The second example from 1959 a year later just has the one number 9521, as does the final appearance of Strato in 1960 (included below) Incidentally, the Hyde Park 9521 number was used as the Thorpe & Porter number at the same address in 1963 and 1964. I have no info (as yet) on the name associated with that number in 1961-1962. Certainly not T&P or Strato. If it helps you to find out the actual phone numbers used for any entries, I'm happy to do so.....I love researching this stuff.

I took a quick look in the phone books for Strato Publications......they only appear in the 1958, 1959 and 1960 directories for London, at 39 Upper Brook St. No record of Strato in England in the phone books either before 1958, or after 1960.@Malacoda

I've now developed a spreadsheet listing the appearances of Thorpe & Porter in BT/GPO Phone books in the UK from 1947 to 1978. It's a bit rough and ready, but I find it interesting to see the explosion of growth in distribution hubs in the early 1960s. Sometimes the address changes within an area (look at various Bristol locations and a Weston-Super-Mare point) or how the Eastleigh location moves around before settling at Botley, mid-way to serve the Southampton/Portsmouth conurbation. And there is even a distribution point in Torquay! I've no idea how to attach it to this post. PM me if anyone interested in a copy.

Happy to help where I can. Most of the UK phone books until the 1980s are on Ancestry so its just a case of finding the right page and then peering myopically at the scanned text. I could look for Top Sellers if it would help.

Here's the addresses for Scotland: 26 Hamilton Place, Edinburgh (listed in 1962,63,64,and 1965) and then subsequently in 1968 as "National Distributor" (whether Scotland or UK it does not say) 36 Farmeloan Road, Rutherglen (listed in 1963 and 1964 only). Overall I've identified 47 locations.

From my analysis of 171 phone books, Oadby was the head office starting in 1949. Then Cedar Ave, Enfield is listed as Nat Distributor in 1963, as is the Blyth Road, Hayes office. The Melton Rd, Thurmaston offices are listed as the main "National Distributors" office in 1965, at which point 19 Upper Brook Street is listed as Publisher. Cricklewood is first listed as a T&P "Publishers and Distributors" in 1966 for one year .

Further to my post above, I'll do the full 111 phone book entries and document in a spreadsheet with addresses as rows and years in columns. Watch this space.

I've not got any of the magazines of that era, but went through the UK Phone Directories on Ancestry for the period 1948-1959 for T&P addresses, @Malacoda The results for that period are below, plus up to 1963 in London: 1947,1948 86 London Rd, Leicester 1958 - Thorpe & Porter, Wholesalers, 171 Southampton Way, SE 5 (Rodney) [Nothing at this address outside 1958] 1959,1960 153 Usk Rd, SE 11 (Battersea) 1949-1959 East St Oadby 1959 2 Gate St Nottingham 1959 18A Halesown Rd, Cradley Heath 1959 Lloyd old Mill Butler St 4, Collyhurst 1959 Stafford Com Passenger Station 1959 66 Palmer St, Weston Super-Mare 1963,1964 39 Upper Brook St, Hyde Park This is not complete. There are a further 80-odd records of addresses of various other locations around the country across the 1950s and 1960s that I could document, if you'd like? But as far as I'm aware, Brook St was only listed as a London address in 1963, and 1964. Southampton Way in 1958, and Usk Rd in 1959 and 1960. Hope this is of some help.

I am absolutely humbled to have my mug shot in the top row of fellow contributors. This group has provided me with many a happy hour when I should be otherwise engaged in more husbandly domestic chores. The best example I've come across of crowd-sourcing to gather solid research materials. My very best wishes to everyone for a Happy Festive Season!

Excellent article, @Get Marwood & I - you'll have to publish all of your research as an Amazon self-published book as a minimum.

You're spot on about this being life and death for me back in those days! Probably for all of us. It is burned into my mind that the duration between the appearance of the comics in Portsmouth and US publication was no more than two monthly issues behind from the time I started to take notice, which was certainly during the 25-cent DC period (mid 71-mid 72). I am aware that collectors of comics I know who were collecting in the late sixties believe that the gap was much wider, so perhaps improved container distribution coupled with non-return comics reduced the cycle time to the UK. Of course, that would mean that a glut of new comics would have occurred on UK spinner racks in the period around 4Q 1971 for a few months, as the newer comics came on stream. I do remember getting vividly getting Batman #234, #235 and #236 from the same newsagents within weeks of each other at the end of 1971. Of course, this is all anecdotal at this remove. I agree that Portsmouth probably had its own T&P rep. There were 88 newsagents in Portsmouth in 1975 (I counted them from the Phone book). Of the 88 newsagents alone in Portsmouth in the mid 70s, if we assume that each newsagent got 60 new comics each month - that would be 60x88 = around 5,000 new comics in Portsmouth each month for a population of 200,000, of which say 2.5% were adolescent lads aged 10-14 (sorry girls). It follows that there were 5,000 lads of comic reading age in Pompey as a market for 5,000 DC comics.

Assuming the decision to drive UKPV's was an opportunity driven by IND's intention for future DC comics sent to the UK to be sourced from first-run comics, rather than returns, do we have evidence that the time between printing in Sparta and arrival on UK spinner racks reduced drastically as a result? Assuming that UK-bound comics post April 1971 continued to be sourced from brand new printings despite still having a US price on them. From memory, monthly DC comics I collected in Portsmouth in the late 1971 period onwards were rarely more than two issues behind comics on US stands, and finding a new comic out of sequence was quite rare. Of course, memory plays tricks...

Sorry to jump into this excellent thread a bit late in the day - fantastic research, @Malacoda - absolutely spiffing. In terms of why DC stopped printing the PV's directly on the comics, it seems to me that a major economic upheaval was in play at this time - the removal of the "pseudo Gold Standard", which had pegged the exchange rate of dollar to the pound as $2.40 = £1 since the devaluation of the pound in 1967. (Prior to this, Bretton Woods agreement in 1945 had set the exchange rate as $4 = £, if I remember correctly). The "pseudo" Gold Standard enabled comics to be priced in the UK for many years at a set and predictable exchange rate. By early 1971 US inflation was on the rise, and a run on gold was looming. And on August 15th, President Nixon announced the suspension of the convertibility of dollars into gold, effectively removing the last vestiges of the Gold Standard. Britain was then forced to "float" the pound against the dollar and exchange rates were no longer predictable. I suppose the question is whether DC set the pricing on those 5 UKPV issues, having made the decision themselves, or was the price printed at the request of the UK distributors? I'm guessing that there was so much worry about the future fluctuating nature of the currency that T&P decided it made more sense to price manually in the UK.

As @Albert Tatlock subsequently mentioned, books and magazines being imported into the UK do not attract customs duty. I was not aware of that. I often wondered how US dealers could bring stock worth thousands into the UK for sale at a London Mart and avoid import duty.

I remember my second solo trip from the UK to New York in 1978 (aged 19) was on Freddie Laker's SKYTRAIN, which charged £59 outwards and a further £78 for the return trip, which amounted to $246 US dollars return at the then-prevailing exchange rates. At the time that Laker transformed Transatlantic pricing, the major airlines were charging $626 return as a basic economy fare. So back in the 1974-78 timeframe, anyone flying with an empty suitcase to pick up comics would have paid $600-odd dollars minimum for the privilege. I've just shelled out $654 for a return ticket Chicago-London on American Airlines in early December; it's amazing to see how the prices have fallen in real terms in the past 45 years when the dollar price has hardly changed.

Nope - there is at least me as a dual Brit/Yank who spent the first 41 years of existence in the UK and the last 23 years here in Chicagoland. The manager of my local comic shop loves to hear me ramble on (well, tolerates me rambling on) about Saturday bike rides in Portsmouth for comics in the seventies. Every time a comic crosses his path with a T&P stamp he sets it aside for me. I have no idea how T&P stamped comics have ended up back here - coals to Newcastle - but perhaps there is a new thread to be created on the subject?

Not sure I can add much of worth to this thread, but I did ask my pal who subscribed to Amazing Spider-Man from the UK for a year starting with issue #136 (once it was clear that Marvel were stopping bringing into the UK for the long haul to avoid competition with the Marvel Weekly). His comment: "No envelope. Just a strip of white paper wide enough to hold my address, about 2 inches wide, maybe, with the comic tightly folded inside it, presumably so the wrapper didn't slip off in the transatlantic post! Real 'throwaway' not 'collectible' attitude to their comics! When you think that nowadays they deliberately print 6 or 8 different covers of the same comic just to sell to the fans!" So obviously subs sent to the UK avoided envelopes at that point to cut down on weight. It would be useful to find some of the discarded wrappers to see if the postage dates co-incided with the dates they hit the US newsstands, I suppose.

I wonder how many customers the BBC had to interview before they decided that she was the most balanced interviewee. It's a great slice of 1970s vox-pop.

My memories of DTW were formed in 1974 when they occupied a premises in Berwick Street, before moving to St Anne's Court. But probably of more interest is the footage of DTW in the BBC documentary "The Dracula Business", which can be found on Youtube. I posted some screen grabs on the Superstuff blog at http://superstuff73.blogspot.com/2021/06/memories-of-dark-they-were-golden-eyed.html . Or take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48aCY8shKc starting at 27:36 for the full film clip inside the shop. Some shots of import comics on a spinner rack are to be found.