SOTIcollector

Chaos Effect Alpha Red retailer incentive edition CGC 9.2 white $90 One of the scarcest Valiants from the Shooter era.

Chaos Effect Alpha Red retailer incentive edition CGC 9.6 white $150 One of the scarcest Valiants from the Shooter era.

Blip #1 CGC 9.0 white $65 Great Marvel Video Game mag from the early days of video games, in February, 1983!

Black Panther #1 (1977) CGC 9.0 ow/w $125

Amazing Spider-man #361 CGC Direct 9.2 white $90 first Carnage

Amazing Spider-man #361 CGC Newsstand 9.6 white $225 first Carnage

Amazing Spider-man #361 CGC Newsstand 9.2 white $110 first Carnage

Fresh from CGC this month. 100% unpressed goodness, in perfect, pristine cases. I was thinking of trying out another sales venue, but decided I'd offer these here first. PM's are welcome, but the first "take it" in thread trumps all. HOS-ers and Probationites need not apply. Payment by Paypal within 3 days. Returns within 30 days in the same condition. Shipping $12 via fully insured Priority Mail within the United States. Books will be shipped within 3 business days of payment (typically quicker than that, though). Contact me for international shipping rates, which will be expensive because I ship only by fully insured methods. I'm happy to provide better photos than these crappy iPhone pics. Just ask. SOTICollector's kudos thread

I love that when the printed the UK versions, they changed more than just the price on the cover. They also changed the banner across the top. Cool books!

I'm intrigued. Tell me more.

One important lesson I learned by reading EC's is: be careful what you wish for. I wished for Tales from the Crypt. Then a new series came out a while back, probably the Papercutz one, and it was beyond awful. Stories and art and grammar were all just atrocious. It felt like it was written, drawn and edited by a six year old. I thought maybe they were going for irony with the whole "be careful what you wish for" theme that runs through so many EC books, but I never bought another issue after that. Against my better judgment, though, I am going to wish for the return of another Golden Age series. I'd love to see any one of these come back, if done well.

And for the more budget conscious, here's another copy of Seduction of the Innocent. This one has no dust jacket, but is otherwise in similiar condition to the one above. Seduction of the Innocent, first edition, first print, second state without dust jacket. Book: Book has a pencil price on the rear free end paper, and sombody tried to erase it, but is otherwise clean and unmarked. Some bumping to head of spine and corners of boards. All typical pages present including 16 pages of illustrations. Bibliography is not present.* *Second state means that this copy does not have the bibilography. The book was originally published with a bibliography leaf (pp. 399-400). When comic book publishers threatened to sue over their name being included in this list, the publisher of SOTI gave in and had the bibliograpy leaf removed from all subsequent copies of the book. Dr. Wertham didn't even know this was happening until he started getting complaints from readers that their books had been mutilated. I have included a tipped-in photocopy of the bibliography for your reference. Yours for just $100 shipped in the US; shipping elsewhere at exact cost for fully insured shipping (if available). The price is firm on this one.

Here's another bad girl. So bad she's mowing somebody down with a machine gun, all while her dainty little robe is falling off. March of Crime #1 Fox Giant, poor condtion, poorly "restored". I posted this recently in the "show you awful restoration" thread I started. The front cover belongs on this book, but the back cover came from the front of a Photoplay magazine of the day. The covers are attached by a piece of brown tape along the spine. This is an awesome collection of horrible crime books, chock full of GGA, bad girls, murder and depravity. Contents include rebound copies of Murder Incorporated #4 Murder Incorporated #2 Jo-Jo #12 Blue Beetle #53 $99 $79 shipped (below my cost) in the US; plus exact shipping outside the US.

And I might as well offer another companion to this trashy "girl". Seduction of the Innocent, first edition, first print, second state with dust jacket. Book: Book has a name on the front free endpaper, but is otherwise clean and unmarked. Some bumping to head of spine and corners of boards. All typical pages present including 16 pages of illustrations. Bibliography is not present.* Jacket: Jacket is solid with spine fading and some paper loss at the head and tail of the spine and at the top & bottom of the flaps. *Second state means that this copy does not have the bibilography. The book was originally published with a bibliography leaf (pp. 399-400). When comic book publishers threatened to sue over their name being included in this list, the publisher of SOTI gave in and had the bibliograpy leaf removed from all subsequent copies of the book. Dr. Wertham didn't even know this was happening until he started getting complaints from readers that their books had been mutilated. I have included a tipped-in photocopy of the bibliography for your reference. Yours for $245 $199 shipped in the US; shipping elsewhere at exact cost for fully insured shipping (if available). The R colophon on the publication page indicates that this is a first edition, first print. Imagine how good this book will look displayed with your newly-acquired copy of the Reform School Girl paperback!

Up for grabs is a book that's tangentially related to my primary collecting interest, which you may have guessed is Seduction of the Innocent. This is Reform School Girl, the legendary and lurid 1948 paperback book that lent both its title and its cover image to the notorious comic book pictured in SOTI. I know the words "scarce" and "rare" are so overused that they have lost most their meaning these days, at least within comic collecting circles. So instead of using one of those terms, I'll provide a couple examples of how tough this is to find. - When you search completed Heritage auctions, you find 24 copies of Avon's Reform School Girl (the comic book); you find only 4 copies of this book. - When you search current eBay listings, you find three copies of the comic book, but no copies of this Diversey paperback. Yes, this is a lower grade copy. BUT, this is a COMPLETE copy. What's so special about that? Here's how Heritage Auctions described it in an April, 2007 auction. "Canadian model and ice skating star Marty Collins posed for the cover shot. Her father sued the publisher for defamation and won, causing the publisher to excise the first page of text from this and all volumes [emphasis mine]." Two of the four copies that Heritage auctioned were missing this page. The other two copies were listed without an indication as to whether this page was present. But it's obviously hyperbole to say that the letters page was removed from ALL copies, because this copy has that letters page, and others have been offered for sale. A seller on AbeBooks described a complete copy (since sold) this way. "This edition sports a lurid cover photo of the REFORM SCHOOL GIRL in all her slutty glory, short dress, high heels, nylons and garter, dangling cigarette, ample bosom. The model for the RSG was a well known Canadian figure skater named Marty Collins. When the book was released with Marty in all Juvenile Delinquent glory Ms. Collins' father was upset. Very upset: contained within the book were two pages of fictional letters from and to the RSG and her father (fictional father I must stress). HOWEVER Ms. Collins' real father was extremely bothered by those (fictional) letters as there are definite conversations between the two about the pregnant Daisy and that Frank, the fictional father, was definitely the father of the child. These rumblings of an incestuous relationship between father and daughter compelled Ms. Collins' real father to threaten a lawsuit if the "letters" were not removed from the book. Diversey quickly caved and had the two pages of letters (one page double sided) neatly removed. MOST copies of this book do not have the letter page. This copy does!! It is one of only a few known copies with the intact letter page, rare and likely the only copy thus that I will ever handle and only the second copy in 25 years that I have had ! (The other was without the letters.)" This book is saddle-stiched (stapled), so there's an added problem related to the excised page. It's not uncommon for the book to lose its corresponding rear page when pages 3-4 are removed from the front of the book. I once owned a copy that was missing pages 3-4, and the corresponding pages at the rear of the book were falling out as a result. The book I'm offering, however, is COMPLETE, with those lurid letters and all. $395 $325 shipped in the US. Buyers outside the US pay exact cost for fully insured shipping (which can get expensive when insurance is included, so contact me for a quote). Okay, the copy of the comic book picured here is NOT for sale. It's just here to show you how well these two things display together.

Some price drops 5/14. Payment via PayPal. Returns for any reason welcome within 14 days. If the return is due to my error, I pay return shipping; otherwise, you pay return shipping. No probationites or shameful ones. Shipping via USPS Priority Mail, fully insured. I ship within 3 business days of receiving cleared payment. PM's are welcome, but "take it" in thread beats everything else.

And here's my favorite poorly restored book. Somebody had an Action 64 with no cover. So they decided to create a new cover. So they drew the cover. In crayon. Well, the blacks are magic marker and ballpoint, I think. The rest is crayon. I can't imagine how many hours somebody spent creating this thing, only to end up with a book that's Action 64 with a crayon front cover. And of course, the back cover is original to some book, but not to this one. That X-acto ad is on the back of Super Duck #9 (1946), so the back cover used here is probably off by a few years.

Here's the one I just got. It was advertised as "Poor condition, restored, trimmed and taped." Oddly enough, it's not really trimmed, at least not trimed any more than your average Fox Giant. But it sure is poor condition, taped, and I guess you could call it "restored", kinda. Or is it conserved? The person who "restored" it chose to put on a back cover that very clearly doesn't belong. The back "cover" is actually the front cover to a Photoplay magazine! And the front of the photo cover is on the inside of the book. Then at some point, after some unkonwn person took care to rebuild the book with a new back cover and taped spine, the book lost a big chunk of its ugly back cover. That's my best guess as to the sequence of events anyway, but maybe the "restorer" put on a back cover that was pre-damaged?

I just got a really fugly "restored" book in the mail this week. So why not a thread with really ugly restoration? I have a couple entries to add. What do you have?

Awesome book! Used in SOTI and POP and Saturday Review of Literature and NY State Legislature doc, and the list goes on. Wertham criticized this particular book every chance he got, probably more than any other single book out there. He had a problem with the dope fiends, faces being erased with gravel, injury-to-the-eye (with a hypodermic needle) and other outlandish stuff.

Basil Wolverine is my favorite!

I had the same problem. I tried logging in from two work computers: one physical machine, and one virtual machine. The virtual machine had the same experience as artboy, but I was able to log in from my physical machine.

Awesome writeup! It's a perspective I hadn't considered, as I hadn't given a lot of thought to newsstand reprints. Hearing of your research reminds me of the time back in the late 80's or early 90's, when I felt like I was the only one in the world collecting 30-cent Marvel variants from the 1970's. It was quite an epiphany when I deduced that every series must have them, and went hunting for them. I uncovered a number of previously-unknown books many years after they were published, and that's one of the things that can make collecting so much fun.