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Thanks, Mr. Kid, that means a lot coming from you. I have indeed been pretty dedicated to this project for 10-15 years now and it's been a lot of fun, not least thanks to friendships I've built with other collectors that I've worked with. The best part is that the whole thing has been surprisingly cheap. Most of the challenge has been in locating the books and not giving up despite some setbacks, for example when "mamanook" was buying every nice copy of the rare last issue that would show up on eBay for several years. I am sure Geppi didn't intend it, but it was actually very discouraging. Fortunately patience, luck, and other board members (not least rarehighgrade) helped me out. The scans below show another example where I ended up with two beautiful books in virtually identical condition. I very much wanted to keep both, but it was still an easy decision for me to let one of them go to help a friend improve his run.

In the past, I've mentioned how the technical grade of a book is less important to me than how "beautiful" it looks. The scan below shows the unslabbed version of a picture from the CGC gallery that I linked to previously. This book, which I got from moondog many moons ago, graded 9.2. The picture below that shows a higher graded copy from my collection. I've been through countless of these types of decisions over the years as I have upgraded my run. In this case, what stood out to me was the colors of the top copy which just make it an incredibly beautiful book in my eyes. The second book is also beautiful and I personally very much like file copy markings which I consider a plus. But when I compare the two, like I would two pieces of beautiful art, one just stands out above the other. Almost every copy has it's own slight variation in hue and saturation; I wouldn't know how to quantify my preferences that but it's just obvious when I compare two books.

That's a beautiful book!

The history of this book so bizarre that it borders to hilarious. First, Willits wanted to preserve it back in the 1950s, so he got it bound in order for it to remain pristine. I absolutely love the thought process. It just shows a genuine love for this high grade book back in a very early stage of the hobby, long before collectors started thinking about all the concepts we take for granted today. That the book was damaged later is completely incidental to me; it is still a great reading copy. It is the fact that Willits treasured this book as a teenager, 10 years before he went on to found The Collector's Bookstore with Leonard Brown, that is so cool to me. Gottfredson's signature is fantastic because it is from long before his name become known and because he and Willits went on to work together on the paintings. I can just envision how Gottfredson would have understood Willits' genuine love for his stories once he saw and signed this beautifully bound comic. The fact that Willits never would have guessed the appeal that motivated me to buy it in 2009 adds an extra twist to the history of the book: the value to me lies entirely in the history of the hobby that it represents. --- Edit: S&B: Thanks, it's always nice to hear that other people enjoy these books. My own favorite moments reading the board is when someone writes something that makes me understand that something I thought was mundane actually is pretty cool.

First picture: I posted this book 5-6 years ago, but here is a more detailed re-scan. The condition of these file copies is pretty consistent. The CGC census currently has 33 blue label books in 9.0+ from 1937. The corresponding number for 1961 is 3,579. For 1965 it is 12,890 (stats courtesy of cgcdata.com). Second picture: As I have learned more about the early history of the hobby, I've developed an interest in material with some kind of association to The Collector's Bookstore. I bought this book because it was so cool how Malcolm Willits went to the trouble to get a Four Color 16 bound like this back in the mid 1950s. The "near mint" copy would have been a real treasure back then so this bound copy reflects a genuine passion for back issues at a very early time. When I got to visit Mr. Willits, he explained that this book came from an incredible original owner collection that would have rated among the finest pedigrees if it had been discovered later. I've heard other long term collectors rave about this same collection but will leave it to them if they want to share more details publicly. In the 1960s, Willits managed to get to meet Gottfredson. The dedication is even more important to me than the book itself, although the story has got to be one of the most classic of the Golden Age.

Here's what the subscription stamp usually looks like (WDCS 12 and 18). Not to derail the original question, this is just something I've been wondering about myself.

If anyone can answer this it would probably be Yellow Kid or Mr. Zoom. I would very much like to know the answer as well. One note I do have about this book is that I have seen two copies with labels like the one shown below, both from dentist's offices. This scan is of my own copy; I have a low grade complimentary edition and a slabbed regular version but have never compared the contents. The second copy was listed for sale on eBay in 2005. I saved a picture of the label somewhere but can't find it right now. I have never seen another Disney comic with this kind of "D.D.S." label, so either it is a remarkable coincidence or these rare variants had some special marketing purpose.

40Y: It would be great if you could share some of the Barks outtakes. I found them among the most fascinating Barks related material when I was getting into US Disney comics as a teenager, but I no longer have copies of the reprints that you mention. Later on, I started collecting the originals. My long term goal is to rebuild Barks' scrap pile as it must have looked around 1960. The picture below shows the first original that I bought. It is from the "Land Beneath the Ground" story from Uncle Scrooge 13. The artwork does not actually have tape across it, I took the photo after wrapping up my originals for a meeting with other collectors. Barks gave this drawing to John Spicer in 1961 when he was one of the first fans to visit Barks and his wife in their tiny house in Hemet. It turned out that John lived close to my home in Palo Alto so he drove down and handed me the drawing in person. He was an extremely nice guy and also brought along a second original that Barks had given him. I later bought that too, along with the 3rd and last drawing Barks had given his brother, Bill. They had kept their gifts for 40 years. I suspect that John decided to let me have them not so much because of the money as because he sensed how much I appreciated them. Barks originals from this period are very rare and seldom offered for sale.

Thanks for the nice feedback, everyone. One of the pictures that I most would like to post is a picture of myself on my 6th birthday in the mid-1970s, enthusiastically showing a near mint digest sized comic to a friend. I still have the actual comic. Just of the rest of my childhood collection it is taped, torn, and completely falling apart from being read so many times. Unfortunately, I don't have those pictures here. I still have almost my entire collection from back then intact, including comics where I first practiced writing my own name. --- The book below is the most recent addition to my collection, found on eBay a few months ago. I've lost count of the times I've won copies in various auctions just because they looked like they might have a faint chance of being an upgrade, but in 80-90% of the cases it turns out that they are not. Still, if I had not taken these gambles I would be missing some of the best books in my run, including the rare 96 page V2#3 which I posted a few weeks ago. I bought that book through eBay in 1999 from a listing that showed a stamp-sized photo lacking all detail. The seller knew absolutely nothing about comics so it was a complete fluke - I can't imagine there is a nicer copy in existence. This time, I was lucky: V1#9 is exceptionally hard to find this nice and the cover is one of the most beautiful in the entire run. I was very happy when it arrived. The seller was a small antiques store which rarely sold comics.

Here's a seemingly unassuming issue that I had been trying to find in high grade for over 10 years; I was really happy when I finally managed to locate a pretty copy. Somehow the issues from the last year have been very elusive. I wonder if it is because no one else cares about the covers without the classic artwork of Mickey and Donald(?). To me, an issue like this is just as cool, in this case because of the link to the premiere of Pinocchio - just about every issue has its own unique appeal. Mickey Mouse Magazine had a number of features related to both Snow White and Pinocchio, Disney's two first full length animated movies. The fact that MMM not only represented the transition from children's magazine to comic book but also reflected the far more critical transition from Disney's b/w shorts to feature films is incredible, I think. To be able to follow these transitions in parallel adds an extra dimension to MMM that is unique to Disney and to the period. I always thought that Walt Disney's Comics and Stories was less interesting because they more or less had found the formula at that point. Actually, Four Color 4, which I posted above, is very interesting in this context as it must have been published during the Summer of 1940. The unusual and puzzling rarity of this book suggests a low print run, but it clearly was a success since MMM became a comic book 3-4 months later.

Thanks. There are no more sketches in the manuscripts. I guess most collectors would care more for the page with the drawing, but I actually only bought this lot because I really wanted the early "Village Blacksmith" -script. The book below is one I had been wanting for a very long time. It became available when a friend upgraded to a CGC 8.0. After I received the book, which was then in an old label CGC 6.0 holder, I felt that it was nicer than the grade indicated and recommended that he should resubmit it. I ended up paying a higher price than we had agreed to, but I could not be happier with the book.

You are right, the surviving artwork is the censored version of the splash panel which was rejected and returned to Barks. Here is another original that I have not posted before. It is the top half of an unpublished page intended for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 175 in 1955. In contrast to the "Trick or Treat" example, Barks discarded this gag himself after he had inked it. According to articles I've read by Geoffrey Blum based on interviews, Barks just didn't think that the gag was funny enough and also pointed out that it could not be understood by children who could not read the dialogue. It was replaced by another, more visual gag where Donald was grabbing the candy from hungry bears at the zoo. A fun little tidbit about this half-page is the almost invisible writing in blue pencil at the top left corner: "has to x-ray nurses", which I have never seen mentioned in any of the many articles on Barks' unpublished art. In the 10-page story, Donald has lost a diamond ring in a batch of taffy and is trying to buy up the candy to find it. Perhaps Barks was making a note to himself to replace (or follow up?) with a gag where D. wants to X-ray the nurses after they have eaten the candy(?). In any case, I see it as an example of how much Barks cared about giving his readers quality for their 10 cents, especially given that he had never received any direct feedback from readers up to this time. My apologies for spamming the Duck thread lately. I may soon have to take a break from posting and am trying to add stuff while I have more time.

I still remember getting to see your Amazing-Man Comics #6 in person a few years ago, that was a highlight for me. It was also the first time I ever got to experience that much talked about smell of a Church copy .

Breathtaking book, sacentaur! And it's nice to see one of these raw once in a while.

Nice to hear that other people can appreciate an obscure title like this. Below is another copy that is hard to upgrade. This cover must be among those that have been reproduced most frequently on various products over the years. In my experience, the iconic covers are usually the hardest to find in high grade. Completely unrelated, I was going through my collection of Carl Barks artwork and came across the splash panel to the "Trick or Treat" story from Donald Duck 26 which I have posted here in the past. This is a long shot, but I'd really like to get hold of an article that was published in Comics Buyer's Guide around 1977. I bought the art around 10 years ago and the previous owner told me that CBG mentioned the sale when he purchased it. I love this kind of documentation on provenance and would very much like a copy. If anyone has any clues on how you could get access to 30+ year old back issues, I'd very much appreciate the feedback. Obviously, there would be some kind of reward but that's better handled over PM.

40YC, Bronty: I have no doubt that the lower circulation in the early history of comics is the reason so few high grade copies exist from the mid-1930s. Around 5 years ago, I was looking into this. I made various charts showing the relationship between the CGC census population, print run, and Overstreet value for 1930s and early 40s DC comics since the most complete circulation data was available for these. Back then, the graphs for the census data and the circulation were virtually indistinguishable (aside from scale, of course) while the Overstreet value seemed to have very little impact. My impression is that the census population more or less is a uniform sampling of all comics published, at least for higher grade, early books where the cost of slabbing is sufficiently low compared to the value of the books. Based on these assumptions, the graph I posted above should give a good indication of the relative number of comics published each year. When you are looking at subsets of books that have populations of less than 10 or 20 copies, a single find can have a very big impact. A few weeks ago, I pointed out (in this thread) how more than half of the CGC graded books from the 1930s in 9.4+ are from the Church collection. If you look at the years 1935-38, I suspect that the CGC census in a year or two will show that the Mickey Mouse Magazines from the Disney Archives will be either the biggest or second biggest source of high grade copies along with the Church collection. Of course the Church books are far more important, but I still think it is an interesting bit of trivia. Here is another book that statistically shouldn't exist. I last posted it 5-6 years ago but this is a better scan. Edit: Btw., unless they have been lost or damaged at some point in the last 40-50 years, there is every reason to believe that the Disney Archives still has one or more runs of at least the same quality as the books I have been posting. But these are obviously extremely unlikely ever to surface.

rarehighgrade's generous sharing of some beautiful early DC comics in "Post your Golden Age Adventure/New Adventure/New Comics" inspired me to make a better scan of one of my own favorite books. For someone who might be new to Golden Age comics, it would be impossible to understand the subtle reason why a seemingly vanilla high grade book like this, along with the contemporary Church copies that RHG posted, are so exciting to me. After thinking about how I would explain that to someone who is new to this segment of the hobby, I came up with the chart at the bottom. It shows the CGC census population of unrestored books in 9.0 to 9.8 from 1935 to 1942. For example, the top blue column on the right shows that there currently are 371 books from 1942 that have been graded CGC 9.0. Basically, the chart gives an indication of just how difficult it is to find any high grade comic if you go back before 1940. For each year you step back prior to 1939, the available pool of books decreases by a factor between 2x and 3x. A book in 9.0+ from 1939 is already very challenging to find, but if you go back two years further it becomes almost 5 times more difficult. Once you reach 1936, the current census population levels out in the single digits. Any surviving high grade book from this era, regardless of title or cover art, truly is a treasure of the hobby if you love beautiful early comics.

First picture: I bought this lot of 115 manuscript pages from the 1960s in a recent Heritage auction. A number of Barks manuscripts from the mid-60s have sold in the last 5 years, mainly from the Barks estate. A friend of mine bought many of these and it was fascinating to go through Barks' edits and corrections to classic stories that I read as a child. Anyway, the real reason I purchased this lot is the manuscript to the 10-pager "The Village Blacksmith" from 1960. I was lucky enough to see this when I visited Mr. Willits and fell in love with it instantly. What makes it special to me is the early date. There may be earlier manuscripts in existence, but I am not aware of them. 1960 is interesting because it was right around this time that Barks and Willits met for the first time. Soon after, a number of other fans would get to meet Barks. I've chosen to focus my collection of Barks originals on the period when Barks was an anonymous artist on payroll, long before Bruce Hamilton turned his name into a successful brand. Barks' first letter to Malcolm Willits sold in the same auction. If the buyer happens to be reading reading this and is having second thoughts about the purchase, I would very much like to hear from you. A friend of mine was the underbidder and we would very much like to acquire this historical item. ----- Second picture: In another thread, I mentioned that my own interpretation of beauty is far more important to me than the CGC grade. On two different inspection trips to Dallas, I got to examine this book and another copy in CGC 9.4. Based on the scans, the latter would have seemed more attractive, but when I got to see it in person it had some stress lines at the spine that bothered me. The 8.5 had a perfectly flat cover and an incredible spine - it looked like it never had been opened. As far as I remember, I got it for around 1/5 of the price that the 9.4 sold for although the former was the more desirable book to me.

Btw., thanks for the scans RHG. The New Adventure 16 is my own favorite: the combination of date, grade and rarity makes it even more appealing to me than the two other books (as incredible as they are). The cover makes me curious if the boy was some kind of pre-Robin sidekick...

The same thought crossed my mind when I saw the MF 45. There is obviously a lot more to the beauty of a book than the CGC grade. That's why it has become increasingly important for me to see CGC graded books in person before I bid on/buy them. I regularly pass on books with a higher CGC grade because I have a lower graded copy that is more beautiful to me. I certainly would not dispute your comments about the quality of Church books compared to others with a higher CGC grade. But it is very hard to quantify how many "beautiful" or "gorgeous" books from the 1930s have survived. What I found new and interesting is that there now is a known subset of books that meet a different but (at least in my mind) fairly consistent quality criteria. This is the most meaningful numerical data point I have ever seen in terms of understanding the scarcity of "near mint" comics from the 1930s. If someone figures out a way to quantify the perceptual aspects of a book's appeal that CGC wisely chose to ignore, I will be there to post geeky stats about that, too.

Books like the New Adventure 29 became even more amazing to me after I looked in the census statistics recently. I was surprised to find that CGC only has graded 31 books from the 1930s 9.6 or higher. Looking at the available circulation data, the total number of comic books published in the 1930s must have been 50-100 million so, at least so far, the survival rate literally looks like 1 in a million (at best). Hopefully more near mint 1930s books have been saved somewhere. With valiantman's help, I was able to obtain a list of the 93 unrestored 1930s books that have been graded CGC 9.4 or higher. Of the 80 books for which I was able to trace the provenance, almost 50 were from the Church collection. Perhaps the biggest surprise to me was how poorly all other pedigrees were represented: the ones that did best were the Denver, Allentown and Crescent City collections which had 1-2 books each. I was not able to identify a single San Francisco copy. For comparison, the census has 241 books in 9.4+ from 1940 alone and 109 of those are in 9.6 up.

AJD, it's always interesting to hear about the Australian editions. Cool how these books have appealed to so many different cultures. The poem below, which I lifted from wikipedia, sums up my own feelings about the Ducks - and collecting comics in general - very well. Reading the Gold board this week somehow made me think of it. Ode to the Disney Ducks They ride tall ships to the far away, and see the long ago. They walk where fabled people trod, and Yetis trod the snow. They meet the folks who live on stars, and find them much like us, With food and love and happiness the things they most discuss. The world is full of clans and cults abuzz as angry bees, And Junior Woodchucks snapping jeers at Littlest Chickadees. The ducks show us that part of life is to forgive a slight. That black eyes given in revenge keep hatred burning bright. So when our walks in sun or shade pass graveyards filled by wars, It's nice to stop and read of ducks whose battles leave no scars. To read of ducks who parody our vain attempts at glory, They don't exist, but somehow leave us glad we bought their story. Carl Barks – 1999

I can't remember who the seller was, but it was a dealer who had picked up a very nice run. It also had a #1 in 5.5 as well as many later issues. I'm enjoying a quiet evening off at the Marriott in Copenhagen tonight with a gorgeous view of the harbor. With nothing better to do, here's a book I don't think I've posted before. What's interesting about this is that I had been looking for a beautiful copy ever since I won the original art to the first, rejected version of the cover in the auction of the Bruce Hamilton estate. A friend of mine had bought the only prior CGC 9.4 from eBay seller execsec2's fantastic auctions a few years before, but despite many attempts and appeals to his conscience I could not get him to sell it to me. Another case where the background story made me extra happy to finally add this book to my collection.

Looks like it was 6 years since I last posted this scan and that the image somehow disappeared. Thought it was time to share it again. Among the first 6 issues of WDCS, only 3 different copies have graded CGC 9.0 or better to date. Two of them came from the "Crescent City" collection: #1 at CGC 9.4 and #2 at CGC 9.0. This is the 3rd. I was unbelievably lucky to get this very cheap when it sold on eBay in 2003 as part of a larger set of nice WDCS. I contacted the seller up to the auction and was told that Steve Geppi also had approached him. This was one of the 3 nicest books, #6, #10, and #12 all in CGC 9.0, to sell. I got it for $1,800 with a snipe bid in the last 5 seconds which apparently surprised "the competition". 2 minutes later, I won #10 for $2,500, again with a snipe bid. The only book I did not get was the #12 which sold for around $2,750. I normally don't like to talk about prices, but in this case the way the auction played out made me extra happy about getting the #6, which clearly was the most exciting of the bunch - not least because of the fun Duck cover (the earlier issues get progressively harder to find). There is absolutely no way I would have won any of these books if I had not been sniping.

By all means do so: it is great to see other people who are enthusiastic about the Ducks. I had a few quiet days and wanted to share some arrivals from the last couple of years, but I'll take a break now.