PopKulture

Yeah, I got lucky on that one. I'm mostly content with gently-used copies, but some books just "pop" in better condition, especially those deep backgrounds. All this talk about paperbacks has me excited to dig through my mostly-buried Avon boxes. I love the later pulpy books, but I also find those books numbered in the 50 to 100-ish range visually undeniable.

One more for now:

Me too!!! So true, and that's a good example. That handful of Popular's that were the break-out books in the 1980's are still tough in grade - less so in my experience The Many Lives of Helen of Troy, but true of Campus Town, Doll's Trunk Murders, and Overboard.

Cool Everett cover:

This Everett cover is one of my favorites of the run:

Playing with some books as the cold weather settles over the Midwest... It's always fun to revisit stuff you haven't seen in a while:

The best rule is always to collect what you like. It's natural to want to grab - as you mention - everything you see in the wild, and certainly there's little harm in it. At some point you may run out of space, but since you're probably buying on the cheap in the wild, you won't have any great dilemma, I'd wager. If you were collecting investing in silver age keys, then I'd advise that you be selective, and buy the highest affordable grades. With something like paperbacks, immersion is one of the best ways to learn within a new hobby. Sure, you can find a tremendous amount of information online and in the old guides (Hancer, Warren, etc.), but handling and leafing through as many copies as you can will bring you up to speed nicely. Happy hunting!!

Next to mapbacks. And Belarskis. Maybe Bergeys...

They're space wasters, but I'm hooked. I figure 50 or so boxes take up the space of nearly 1000 comics, so you really have to be a devotee. I also collect space-wasting pop bottles and other junque, so space is always at a premium, and display space even more so.

Right you are about that limited but aggressive pool of bidders. It doesn't take many people to create the illusion of widespread demand. I warned my friend similarly when he was going after a complete set of the original Tom Swift's in fine-ish dust jackets. He observed that prices were rocketing up as he was acquiring the bulk of his, and I casually suggested that, to some extent, he was the market. When he stopped buying them, prices came back down observedly. Same thing happens every few years with antique cigar boxes, which I collect. A few new buyers come in and spread more money around, and prices spike for a while before they lose interest and the prices retreat noticeably. I think to some extent we are seeing that with niche genres like Dan DeCarlo covers and some other GGA, and mind you, it can happen with Cole, Baker and PCH (like it has before).

I think they got thrown out more because nobody thought they were worth anything and a lot of people perceived them as a bit seedy, and were thus embarrassed that a family member had them.

Congrats on the nice pick-ups! Sin Street is a great book, which fits in with the giant, green clutching hand genre, and the Avons are great books, too. The Chinese Parrot was one of my first vintage paperbacks bought as a kid from the old lady across the street because I loved the cover. That seems like so long ago - not measured in years but ump-teen boxes of PB's ago...

Take

Great choices!! You took a lot of the same covers I would choose...

Take 29

And for me, one of the all-time classic silver age covers.

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