Bookery

You have a couple of generations now that really don't read (or at least, read digital only). Books are costly and take up a lot of space. It's almost impossible to buy quality bookshelves anymore without having them custom made, because it doesn't pay to manufacture them. The concept of a library isn't even calculated into the construction of even expensive homes anymore. Physical books are now considered archaic. And... the current generation (teens and early twenties) don't really collect anything... all of their time is taken up texting and visiting YouTube and blogs. And to be fair... whole swaths of authors just aren't relevant to current generations. As i said, some of the really expensive books are still expensive for the time being just out of tradition. But many others just don't have much of a market. Markets are more art-driven now, and most hardback books don't have that much artistic design (with some exceptions like Burroughs). So if you don't even know who the author is, and the jacket design is just routine... why would you be motivated to shell out money collecting them?

The most alarming collapse of all has to be the rare/used book market. There were collectors for rare and out-of-print books almost since the invention of the printing press. It was a huge viable market for 500 years! Then in a quick 20 year span it all collapsed. Sure... as has been stated, there are plenty of nosebleed rarities purchased by elites... but many of these are just valuable for being valuable. Nobody has been reading Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Steinbeck for a couple of generations, and the only reason some of those prices remain high is because they always have been. More precipitous is simply the fall of the general used book. You think $1 comic bins are a tumble from $5 retail price? Try buying $25 hardbacks that are tough sell at $1 a year later. There is some increasing interest in vintage paperbacks, as there has been with pulps... but that's more to do with cover art than the content within. I love rare books and still carry some in my shop... but that's out of my own nostalgia rather than a sound business decision. Rare books, stamps, coins... these were traditionally the gold standard of collectibles. "Pop culture" collectibles have always been even more ephemeral... with most being popular for only a few years (Beanie Babies) to a few decades (Big Little Books, Hummels, Coca-Cola tie-ins, all-things western) before ultimately having no interest for a new generation.

Yes... there is actually quite a bit of affordable GA out there. LB Cole has some fantastic animal covers, and most are not that expensive. The early Looney Tunes are very colorful and fun. Most would scoff, but there are a few choice Classic Comics with great covers and that nice early banner logo... Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, etc. Later Jumbo and Jungle Comics with great covers are still surprisingly cheap, as are non-good girl Wings. Lots of other underappreciated war comics and teen humor. The early Abbott & Costello comics have some nice good-girl covers and interior art. And there are even more affordable hero comics than you'd think... most post-war Fawcett, Quality, and some of the off-beat publishers. Plenty of cheap crime comics. In fact, most GA is actually cheaper than much of the popular silver-age stuff! It's primarily WW2 covers, pre-code horror (and not even all of that), Timely and DC that get the big prices and attention. And the fun of GA is that it's more challenging to locate (you can own every Marvel silver-age key tomorrow if you want to pony up the cash), and your collection is more likely to be near-unique (sure, it's fun to show off your Daredevil 1-100 issues... but you also share that same collection with a thousand others).

The book being advertised, "Strictly Private", came out in 1929. There's no telling what sort of reprint this is, however, or when it was released. It's possible the entire magazine is cobbled together from older reprints?

There appears to be a lot of new pulp buyers leaping into the fray that have no real background knowledge of the market. 1940s Weird Tales issues are quite common.

You're lucky to have had a ruler! When I was young we were so poor two of my friends would have to catch and stretch out a copperhead snake while I drew a line beside it. One of the lads spent a week in the hospital after we dared for an isosceles triangle! But... good times, good times.

It's not a comic. There may be a couple of b&w illustrations inside, but it will be mostly text. I believe this is a story paper, akin to the dime novels of the period but thinner (and only 5-cents). These were basically adventure stories in the early pulp vein, but geared to younger audiences. Most of them seemed to have either western themes or mystery themes (sort of precursors to the Hardy Boys). Others here can give you more specifics on the Buffalo Bill series specifically.

You have no context to any of your comments... they are just a mural of broadly-brushed bigotries. Let's take them separately: "Something to realize which I wish people new to this hobby is that the majority of comic shops are predatory to those in need and or those who do not understand the pricing and worth of comics". I don't know if it's a majority or not, but no doubt there are lots of crooks and incompetents in this business. But there are lots of crooks and incompetents in any business... be it lawyers, doctors, mechanics, contractors, grocers, bankers, brokers, auto repair workers, whatever... You can't do everything in life by yourself... you have to research and seek out trustworthy alternatives. "For a dealer to insult someone by saying they'd only pay a few cents on each comic is really terrible". If you're paying that on key items... sure... but the standard rate on bulk comics (comics selling for no more than $1) is about 10-cents per book. And even at $1 apiece, I'll generally only sell about 1 out of every 3 books purchased. Not exactly getting rich on these. Just last week I bulked out about 2500 comics to another dealer for 8-cents apiece myself... and I was happy to get it! "It is always worth it to sell things yourself." Ridiculous. How much time and effort is it worth to you? I put in about 60 hours per week to "sell things myself". Are you willing to do that? You could say that about anything. You can learn how to do your own car repairs. You can grow your own crops. You can pull your own infected tooth. You can even build your own house. Think of the money you'll save! All it takes it time and learning and dedication. All of modern civilization is based on the fact that we are willing to hire others to do things that we don't have the time or patience to do ourselves. Sure... sometimes it's best to sell something yourself if you have access to a willing buyer and we're not talking about a lot of merchandise. And sometimes it's smarter to take a discount off of "full retail" (whatever that means) to let someone else do all of the work. "Even if you get someone to do a consignment for you it'll be better than selling to pretty much any shop." Huh? Who are you consigning to? Aren't you going to have to consign it to a shop or auction house? Even eBay is a sort of consignment in which you will pay not insignificant fees for their service (and in the case of eBay... you still have to do all of the work yourself!). How long are you willing to wait for that consignment item to finally sell? How can you trust that the item really sold for what you are being told it sold for (not talking about major auction houses of course, where you can track the sale of the item). Even if you sell through a huge player like Heritage, you are only getting about 65% of the final sale price, and you'll have to wait weeks to get your money (after waiting for the auction to be scheduled and take place, time for buyers' funds to clear, etc.). There are several dealers on these boards alone who will pay you that much, or more, for decent items, and you'll get paid immediately. "They'll make hundreds of percent in profit for each comic you give". After purchases and operating overhead, I will generally clear about 10% - 20% of retail sales per year. And there are always rough years where you don't even make a profit (housing bust period, major repair years, etc.). "Because this market is still looked at as niche you will always have people assuming the comics are worthless and give them away to these vultures for pennies." Yes, they are out there, and it frustrates me as much as you. Every month I hear about a collection sold to some small dealer for a tenth of what I would have paid. But you have to do at least a modicum of research on dealers the same as you would before hiring a contractor. Every day someone is allowing a door-to-door roofer with no credentials to work on their home. But that doesn't mean the entire roofing industry is crooked. If you are dead-set on being taken... you will be taken. In the end, there is no one solution for selling your collection. Auctions can make sense, especially if you have rare items that are hard to evaluate. Selling yourself makes sense if you have the time and enjoy it, and if the items have enough general interest (though again, I'm not sure what "selling yourself" means, other than setting up at a show or through a direct ad). And selling to dealers makes sense if you take the trouble to find the right dealers... especially if you have a large amount of stuff, need to get paid quickly, have niche market stuff for which it takes years to establish a clientele, etc..

The "rare book market" is so old that it actually is far more specialized than the comic book market. 20th-century books are most comparable to comics... with this, usually, the dust-jacket is king. You want the jacket as sharp and in as original condition as possible. What is interesting here is that unlike comics in which "married" parts are a big hit in valuation, in books it doesn't matter if the book and the jacket are from the same copy, as long as both are original to that edition (in many cases there wouldn't be a way to tell anyway). With older books it gets trickier. Especially with books from the 1700s and earlier, it can be hard to determine what exactly is an "original binding". Many books were sold as loose sets of pages to be bound by the owner in the manner he saw fit (often to match the "look" of a library). In some cases, a fine leather re-binding of an older book, especially by a famous binder, might actually be worth more than its cheap original binding. Fiction collectors often desire the book to be as issued from the publisher. Non-fiction collectors (science, exploration, etc.) are often more interested in the content than overly concerned with how it was bound. Of course, in all cases, completeness is critical... are all of the illustrations (plates), maps, endpapers, fold-outs, etc., still intact...

Oh no! Another pressing thread!

We talk often of "old comics" and refer to things like "golden-age" as if they were rare antiquities. But it is a testament to just how modern the entire comic book medium is, when we have still had original owner collections surfacing into the 2020s. You don't hear rare book collectors declaring "I love acquiring 18th-century first editions... but only if it's from an OO collection!".

I discussed this with CGC about a year ago. I don't know what they've finally settled on, but personally, although trimming is a defect, it's not as serious as with comics, depending. If it is just the cover that is trimmed, if done neatly, I will note the trim but still grade the pulp up to "vg" (4.0) if it is otherwise attractive. However, if the whole pulp is trimmed, as in not only the cover but all pages have been trimmed to make the book a certain overall size (I refer to this as "block-trimming"), I consider it a significant defect, no better than a 2.0, and probably less. I don't consider the pulp "restored" in either case, since material has been removed, but it does bring down the grade.

I am! 6 of the top network news services have 3-letter names. CGC is a 3-letter name. Are we really just going to chalk this up to... coincidence?

No... because the deal isn't even done yet. If the seller sees your excitement about the collection, and you talking about all of the DMs pouring in, he might feel he could make more elsewhere and you may never see the other half of the collection. And though these comics won't impact the larger market (conventions, eBay), if you have a shop, it would certainly affect your local market... I certainly would expect I could get a deal if I knew you were sitting on 40 copies of an issue.

Though to be fair (and I may be wrong about this) weren't the slabs being used an older version than what we have now, despite "newer-looking" labels being inserted in them?

Thanks. This clarifies a very confusing situation that was spread across 2 threads, though I think in the last couple of days most of us began to figure out what was taking place, especially with the sudden burst of incoherent rants that came out of nowhere from the one poster.

Witches be crazy.

https://www.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=0+790+231+4294937841&limitTo=4294937841

Both are Street & Smith publications, so it's just an in-house re-use of George Rozen's art.

Yeah... that whole thread in golden-age never made a lot of sense. And now he isn't filing a police report? Very odd.

Some dealers, at least, must think someone still wants to read it. The first-edition copies being offered at ABE start at $1,000!

We've covered a lot of ground here. If only there was a way to summarize the last 2-dozen posts or so... pulpish adventure, current horror themes, sexist portrayals, over-the-top imagery, women-in-peril, marine biologists... hmmmm....

That's another traditional aspect of the horror genre. You create a villain so evil, so vile, so disgusting, that there is a cathartic cheer when said villain(s) are finally dispatched. In fact, one might argue that the horror pulps of the 30s are actually less disturbing than today's horror, because usually those inflicting the torture get their comeuppance. Beginning in the late '70s, the genre began making heroes of the monsters, wherein the audience cheers the slaughter and laughs when the villain gets away with it all at the end. I find today's slasher-type films more bothersome than the story-monsters spawned during the Depression.