baggsey

I think that Fred Thorpe (b 1913) had a lot in common with Atlas Publishing founder Walter Stephen Dexter (1868-1945), who also started as a newsagent employer around 1901 in Lambeth before branching very successfully into multiple London newsagent shops and the wholesale newsagency business around 1910. Of course, Fred Thorp was a generation - almost two generations - younger than Dexter. Dexter got involved with the Waste Materials trade (recovery of paper and rags) at the same time that he set up Atlas Publishing & Distributing in 1915. Dexter was an incredible entrepreneur who grew his business on the back of reprinting pulps from 1916 onwards. He actually incorporated a sister company Atlas Publishing Co in New York for the purposes of making business easier with the New York based pulp publishers. In addition he developed a chain of London bookshops - Dexter's Bookshops - from 1929 which survived until 1970. Dexter was a regular semi-annual traveler to New York from 1925 until the start of the second world war, negotiating pulp reprint contracts and making deals with freight forwarders. Dexter died in 1945, and the business was taken over by his son Walter James Dexter as publisher. The son Walter James had previously worked in insurance, and had lived in China at one point - possibly Australia. From available evidence so far, son Walter James never went to New York to build new relationships for pulp reprints, nor negotiate for reprint rights on US comics. It was Walter James Dexter who set up the distribution of K.G.Murray's DC comic reprints. However , 1948 marks the point when Fred Thorpe started taking annual business trips to New York (2 suitcases and 1 briefcase), first by steamship and then by BOAC, Pan-Am and TWA. I can find no evidence (so far) of any post-1956 US immigration records for him in New York. A look at the pulps that Thorpe & Porter reprinted in the UK show they cover a period of 1946-mid 1950s.

@themagicrobot No - I have yet to investigate the business relationship between K G Murray and Atlas. I may have caused some confusion in the previous post. I don't believe that the material necessarily involved copyright infringement in the UK, although K G Murray were presumably licensed only to produce comics for the Australian market. The issue is likely to relate to distribution rights. The example I posted previously that Atlas were served an injunction in Feb 1947 to withdraw all Australian imported copies of 'The First Lady Chatterley' in breech of William Heinemann Ltd's sole right to distribute in the UK may have some bearing on the cessation of distribution of the Batman, Superman, Superadventure comics Atlas had distributed in the 1950s, once T&P obtained DC distribution rights for the UK. But its a guess at the moment.

I've been doing a deep dive on all of the pulps that Atlas published in the period starting in 1921, and in a number of instances Atlas picked up publishing reprints of American pulps the following month to when T&P dropped reprinting. For example, in 1952 T&P were publishing Popular's "Detective Tales" pulp for UK consumption. They decided to stop, and Atlas picked up the reprints immediately from T&P. Similarly in 1953 T&P were publishing Popular's "Star Western" pulp reprints, but decided to stop publication, and Atlas picked it up. On the face of it, it looks like there was some history of co-ordination between T&P and Atlas. I suspect that Atlas had to stop distributing the K G Murray Superman and Batman comics due to copyright infringement likelihood. Back in Feb 1947 Atlas had been served an injunction to withdraw from sale all copies of 'The First Lady Chatterley’ (the first draft of the final book Lady Chatterley's Love) imported from Australia, because they were in breech of UK publisher William Heinemann Ltd's copyright. Before that, back in 1938, they had been found guilty of libel for an article in an issue of Boxing magazine, even though they were only the UK distributor of the issue, not the publisher, so even if they were purely a distributor of K.G. Murray's comics, perhaps they felt they could be liable for prosecution in a copyright infringement case.

Many thanks for the offer, @themagicrobot - Rich (Malacoda) has kindly sent me through a copy of the PDF. It is an interesting read. As well as a brief mention of Atlas, the article briefly touches on T&P's import of cheap remaindered paperbacks from ACE, Monarch, etc. All so tantalising..

Thanks @Albert Tatlock - you've put me on the right track. I've determined from Wikipedia that it's an article in Vol 1 of that series Paperback, Pulp and Comic Collector. However, I've ordered the one you pointed me to, as Vol 1 does not appear to have a Chibnall article. Thanks again.

I presume you're referencing Steve Chibnall's book "The Sign of the Tee Pee: The Story of Thorpe & Porter," ? Any idea where I can find a copy?

Thanks @themagicrobot and @Malacoda . I wonder if that Superman annual actually made its way to Australia from the printers in Edinburgh, only to find its way back to the UK? Atlas publishing were certainly an interesting company. In the 1940s they made a concerted effort to be a publisher of original material, but the type of book was a bit down-market "Dog Racing & Betting" was an original self-help book in 1946, followed up by "An Indiscreet Guide to Soho" for the discerning punter. In 1949 they were served an injunction by William Heinemann Ltd for copyright infringement when Atlas imported an original book "The First Lady Chatterley" from Australia. I think once the original publishing failed they fell back on the Annuals and pulp reprints as the core business.

I’ve been researching them as a result of an article I’m writing on which Doc Savage pulps were published officially in the UK as either UK publications/paperbacks or UK price variants. I've found philsp.com very useful in identifying which Doc pulps were printed by Atlas, and the covers shown are very useful. I’ve trawled the phone directories for Atlas and tracked them from starting in 1916 through to 1970. They were initially at 21 Bride Lane, moving to 18 Bride Lane around 1923, and stayed there for most of the remainder of the period. Is your “14 Bride Street” a typo? If not, can you point me to the source? I’m currently looking at the electoral rolls for Bride Lane to identify registered occupants at those addresses, which if a business address also points to a residential address. I’ll then cross-check the names against the1939 census for stated occupation. Hopefully I’ll build a better picture of the growth of the company. Nothing in Companies House that I can find.

At the risk of going off-topic slightly, can anyone point me to information about the ownership of Atlas Publishing Company, who latterly printed reprints of Batman, Superman, Superboy in annuals in the 1950s and 1960s, but previously was the publisher of Street & Smith's pulps from 1916 until the early 1960s, when their hardback Annual publishing seemed to dominate their output.

Yes, @Albert Tatlock , thanks for the reminder of that, but AFAIK the overwhelming majority of comics that arrived in the UK, at least in the late sixties and seventies were without arrival dates, either pencilled or stamped. That said, it might be worth analyzing the incidence of arrival dates on comics to see if they were more prevalent on UK-imported comics in the early sixties. It might indicate a change in fulfillment strategy for comics going to the UK. Incidentally, I visited a small independent comic shop close to me here in the Chicago hinterland, run by a chap in his seventies who started collecting with Spider-Man #6. He mentioned that one of the drug stores he frequented for new comics always had the arrival date pencilled on the comics by the owner to remind the owner when to send the comics back. He also confirmed to me that it was common (at least in Elgin, IL) for multiple issues of any title to remain available before the oldest was returned for credit.

Interesting that the image you provided has a "4" inside the TeePee stamp, whereas the one I posted has a "1". Presumably they were following the same batching process they followed for DC imports in the same period.

At the risk of going off-topic, Can anyone point me to what information exists on paperbacks that T&P imported from the US into the UK in the sixties? It looks like T&P imported Belmont paperbacks of the Shadow in the period 1963-1967. The sticker on this book currently for sale seems tto be a T&P TeePee ?

To add a belated two cents to this discussion on pull dates.....back in 1977 (Jul 11th-Jul 31st) on a family visit to the US (Caldwell, NJ) I definitely was pleasantly surprised that the local 7-11 had two consecutive copies of Detective Comics on the spinner rack - #471 and #472 which had cover "pull" dates of August and September. I bought them both. Of course, that is only one data point. Like you, I believe that the comics that turned up in the UK were not comics that had been returned after the pull date, but were comics from wholesalers warehouses more likely to have been returned unsold when the next issue of a comic was published.

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.