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Here's one of my own favorite books in its new CGC holder. CGC 8.5 may not sound that special, but I can't imagine there is a more beautiful or higher graded copy out there. Some of first few Mickey Mouse Magazines were printed on very high quality paper, but from V1#6 the quality dropped dramatically. The next few months had the worst paper I've ever come across among Golden Age books and you hardly ever find copies without severe tanning or brittleness. Thanks to some literature that Yellow Kid provided me with, I discovered that the publisher, Hal Horne, had been losing a lot of money on Mickey Mouse Magazine during the first few months of publication. It is tempting to speculate that this was the reason for the switch in paper quality. The March 1936 issue sold 116,330 copies, down from 147,751 for V1#1 (which was priced at 25 cents). Sales continued to drop to 76,932 with V1#8. Hal Horne resigned as editor the following month to pursue a career in the motion picture industry and Kay Kamen, who had tried hard to persuade Horne to stay, reluctantly took over as publisher. Interestingly, the switch back to Kamen coincides with my empirical observation that the paper quality starts improving again with the last few issues of V1. Beautiful, under appreciated books like this one are my own favorites which I am just as fond of as expensive keys. I paid little more than $100 for this copy off eBay over 10 years ago when Disney Auctions sold a large part of well known Disneyana collector Jeff Lotman's collection. Several of the early Lotman issues are the nicest copies I have ever seen by a wide margin. This one is obviously among them. The cover art is from "The Band Concert", the first Mickey Mouse short in color which was released in February, 1935. Tom Wood's adaptation for Good Housekeeping is shown below. Edit: for some reason the photo is turned 90 degrees on my Apple devices but not on my pc.

It's wonderful that you've managed to hold on to such a beautiful copy for so long. It must have been very important to you when you were willing to make such a sacrifice. When I was a teenager, I didn't appreciate the appeal of high grade comics and would much rather have more reading copies for my savings. I just received the first Fantagraphics volume and thought that the format was nicer than the previous US editions. When the European Barks library came out a few years ago, I had a great time re-reading all the stories. The reproduction of "Race to the South Seas" is nicer in the Fantagraphics book than in any other reprint I've seen. I also got copies of the other new Disney titles but am still reading those. Regarding my meeting with Yellow Kid, it felt like I had just scratched the surface of what I wanted to talk with him about after my 4 day visit. We barely had time to get started on the auction catalogs although that had been high on my list of priorities.

The book is great, but meeting YK was indeed priceless. As for the two year wait, I am embarrassed to say that I bought some even more "pick-up-in-person"-er books from another board member in 2007-2008 that he is still waiting for me to pick up in person... Suffice to say that I am not a fan of rushing things.

I bought this book from Yellow Kid a couple of years ago, but it was only last month that I finally found the time to visit him and pick it up in person. It has special significance to me since it can be traced back to Leonard Brown's collection with absolute certainty. I've become fascinated with the history of the Collector's Book Store and have started collecting items with some sort of connection to it. A big thanks to Yellow Kid for letting me have this book.

Welcome to the board.

In one of my safe deposit boxes, I keep one of those instruments that record the max and min temperature and humidity since the last time it was reset. I live in an area where temperature varies a lot so it offers a little extra reassurance.

Wow! A Clarabelle Cow cover! Cool! (thumbs u Interesting is that Clarabelle was initially portrayed naked with swaying udders in the cartoons: They soon covered her up though. I suppose young kids exposed to swaying udders might grow up to be, oh, stockbrokers, bankers, bakers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, congressmen, whatever.... In the documentary "The Hand Behind the Mouse", Leslie Iwerks explains that "unpolished" jokes about farm animals were mainstream in Kansas City at the time when Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks were growing up. They, especially Iwerks, took that style with them when after they moved to California. Btw., I was lucky enough to buy iggy's beautiful WDCS 8 above and hope it will be happy among it's new friends in my collection.

I got to see a gorgeous copy of the 2nd book a few years ago when I bought it for a friend through Hake's. I recall the book as in the near mint range with a VF dust cover. It's the only super high grade copy I've ever heard of. Anyway, just one of those memories that stick when you're into rare high grade books. Btw., as far as I remember the illustrations in one book are a subset of those in the other, but they are edited and reformatted. This is a few years back so I could be wrong.

It is fun to see the Robinson Crusoe book. Mark Wilson has consigned a CGC 9.4 copy of that for the November Heritage auction. I recently read a newspaper article from 1935 where Disney mentioned that one of the books from the prior year had sold 2,4 million copies. That seems to suggest that the market for children's books must have been a much bigger concern than the emerging market for comics at the time. 2,4 million is more than twice the circulation that Superman 1 reached 5 years later and almost 20 times the distribution of Action 1. I've always thought of Disney's gradual transition from children's books to comics in 1935-40 as a way to increase sales, but perhaps the fear of losing market share to other publishers may have been an even more important factor, especially after 1938 when DC's sales started growing exponentially. Just speculating....

I love those MMM covers with characters from the shorts. Ferdinand the Bull is to Sweden what David Hasselhoff is to Germany. A few years ago, the short was replaced with another in the traditional Christmas Day Disney tv show and, from what I've heard, it almost resulted in a revolution. --- Here's an article I found in the New York Times archives while looking up the history of Ferdinand the Bull. These exhibitions must have been pretty spectacular.

Congratulations, that's a beautiful copy. And it sounds like you're having a great time at these conventions. I started collecting the Four Colors myself 5-10 years ago, but I gave up around the time #386 started selling for way more than I was comfortable with. Lately, the more reasonable prices have made me interested again and I've added a few nice Four Colors to my own collection. They are a lot of fun to collect.

I didn't see the new Action 5 in CGC 9.4 mentioned anywhere? Seems likely this could be coming from the Atlantic City collection given how much higher the other issues graded compared to all other sources(?).

I noticed that the sales thread is up now.

Some really nifty books in there, iggy. Aside from the obvious treasures, you hardly ever see V1#11 in any condition at all. Last I checked, there were only 3-4 copies in the CGC census so it might be worth getting it certified. I think there's a good chance you can find a coverless Mickey Mouse Magazine V1#5 with a little patience as more than half the copies I've seen have had partial spine splits.

Back in May, I posted the surprising statistics below related to the census population of 1930s books in unrestored CGC 9.4 up. This elusive club finally reached 100 members last month. I found the rate of change interesting: New additions: 2011: 13 2010: 11 2009: 2 2008: 4 2007: 2 2006: 1 2005: 9 If you ignore Mickey Mouse Magazine Series 1-3, the list looks like this: 2011: 6 2010: 0 2009: 1 2008: 4 2007: 1 2006: 1 2005: 9 * 2011 has seen the highest number of new additions, both with and without Mickey Mouse Magazines, since 2005. * There are now 17 Series 3 Mickey Mouse Magazines (this number is likely to grow before the end of the year). * The most remarkable observation to me is how big a difference the submission of even a small group of raw Church books can make. Most (if not all?) of the 6 2011 additions are King Comics. Several of these are even from 1937 where the census has very few books in 9.4 up: the majority of the 100 books are from 1938 and 1939.

Beerbohm's master list had long runs of Dell comics, including what surely would have been the best existing run of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories from #1 up. At some point, I believe nearmint(?) brought up that no one had ever seen a Nedor from the San Francisco collection. As far as I remember, the general consensus of the discussion was that the list must have been incorrect. Looking at Timely's list, I find it puzzling that both Nedors and Dells are missing completely. Could the master list have been so wrong, or is it more likely that these groups were sold off as large lots early on and never surfaced on the market again? If this happened 35-40 years ago, perhaps we will know a definitive answer not so long from now...

Congratulations, AJD. Watching all the thousands of posts about other publishers, it is really nice to see a few other people enthusiastic about the books that were my own favorites as a child.

The quality of that book is best summed up by a quote from Hegel: "The identity between quantity and quality, which is found in Measure, is at first only implicit, and not yet explicitly realised. In other words, these two categories, which unite in Measure, each claim an independent authority. On the one hand, the quantitative features of existence may be altered, without affecting its quality. On the other hand, this increase and diminution, immaterial though it be, has its limit, by exceeding which the quality suffers change. [...] But if the quantity present in measure exceeds a certain limit, the quality corresponding to it is also put in abeyance. This however is not a negation of quality altogether, but only of this definite quality, the place of which is at once occupied by another. This process of measure, which appears alternately as a mere change in quantity, and then as a sudden revulsion of quantity into quality, may be envisaged under the figure of a nodal (knotted) line."

Jeez Louise... here you go. Why do I like these? Well, I'm sure that nostalgia plays a part - loved them as a kid in the late 60s early 70s. But I also like the pacing - they are like a Jerry Lewis film, with a headlong madcap rush about them. I like the way that Fethry always talks Donald around to his idiotic schemes, despite Donald's better instincts and the advice of his long-suffering cat. I'm even in print in my appreciation of Fethry - in WDC&S #669 (which also records my faulty memory for posterity, but c'est la vie). BTW - has O. O. Duck appeared anywhere else? These bring back long lost memories from my own childhood. I guess we must be the same age since Fethry must have been one of the most era-challenged Disney characters ever. I liked the stories a lot, too, but it must have been over 35 years since I last read one.

Great to see you posting again, ES01.

Fortunately, all the original art that Barks had left by around 1960 would have been accessible to Malcolm Willits. He and Leonard Brown had all of the pages from the unpublished "Silent Night" story at Collector's Book Store. I've been told that they were sitting at the store for years but no one would touch them at the ~$200 price tag. Eventually, some ended up in the hands of early Barks fans like Donald Ault (page 2) and Thomas Andrae ("my" page). Having met Mr. Willits, I have little doubt that he arranged to make high quality photostats of the unpublished art before it was distributed among collectors. There were some originals that Barks had given away before he met Willits, including those from Uncle Scrooge 8 and 13 that I posted earlier. I imagine these would have been unknown until Bill Spicer (one of the recipients) met other fans in the late 1960s or early 70s. If other board members have more details, I'd love to hear them. Below is another book that is not that easy to find in high grade. I bought the 8.5 from Metropolis around 1999 (graded VF+) and the 9.0 from Moondog around 2001 (also accurately graded). Heritage had a 9.4 for sale last year, but I passed after inspecting it (the front cover was a little too dirty for the price, I thought).

Here's the original art to the 3rd page from the story. You can barely make out how Barks attempted to correct the lyrics which his editors apparently thought were sacrilegious. There are 10 1/2 original pages from the 1940s known to exist (+ a rejected cover) and 9 1/2 of those come from this story. I bought this page the same day it was listed for sale in 2002. To my knowledge, it is the only one that has been on the market since the 1990s. Here is the same page along with the original art to the first 1 1/2 page (the artwork for the first 1/2 page is presumed lost). The photo is from a Barks exhibition in Austria.

Thanks! That first one also holds the record for the highest price ever paid for an interior comic book page from the Gold or Silver Age (excluding any private sales that I have not heard about). --- I've bought most of my Mickey Mouse Magazines raw. Whenever I upgraded, I've tried to sell the extra copy so someone else could enjoy it. The exception has been when two books were almost equally nice, in that case I've usually kept both. That's how my collection inadvertently ended up with situations like this. No warehouse finds: these all came from different sources over the years. The 9.2 is my favorite.

Congratulations! That Redskin sounds scarily difficult, though. I'll also start looking for it...