Get Marwood & I

Is that the birthday date from Mike's or the birthday date stamped on the actual comics themselves?

Popular Book Centre Cents reduction, but who cares. I still like it. Oh, taboo do you think you're trying to impress there, Beyonder!? Me. Love it!

Just wait until you try to factor in all the other publishers. There are so many bloody plates spinning in this short distribution window even I* can't put a single chart together to make sense of it all. And God knows I've tried. *Apologies for bigging myself up there. I like charts, in case you hadn't noticed.

....which wasn't limited to Marvel by the way. I see the same with Archie - T&P stamps on cents copies and some UKPVs (but definitely not as a rule, if the extant volumes are any indicator).

Carpal tunnel syndrome, I reckon. A case of the old stamping jitters, as they used to call it.

That's not true, Rich. T&P used price stamps with numbers for a long time period and then dropped the numbers around the point of decimalisation as this grid of examples shows. Marvels - whether cents or erroneously stamped UKPVs - were stamped using those same stamp versions above in the applicable time periods. The point at which the numbering stopped was the same for DC and Marvel and every other publisher. The salient point is that T&P needed the numbers for cents distributed books during the time period and that applied to all publications in the time window, including Marvel. Am I misunderstanding you somehow? PVs only excluded the numbering system because they were not stamped (as a rule, by design). Something different was happening there, between solicited UKPVs versus stamped cents copies. In the applicable numbered stamp time period, numbers were needed for cents imports for a reason we have yet to decipher. They weren't for solicited UKPVs. That doesn't make the stamp numbers secondary, where used, in my opinion.

Whoops! Red mark against Ethel for double stamping. It wastes ink.

Indeed, you could lay them out in groups like below, then stamp them all in one go - bang-bang-bang-bang-bang - move on to the next laid out group, etc, then go back and shuffle the first lot, start again with the next group.... Maybe that is why so many stamps are sited top right. Of course, that doesn't work with stamps located in or near the centre of a book.

The suggestion for that has always been to prevent out of date books going on sale in the UK, i.e. past their cover date due to the shipping time. You think it was quick, as I recall, I think it was slow. At least in the early days. The stamp numbers served a purpose, otherwise they wouldn't have been there. They don't have to be secondary to the price or anything else. They're there. That's it. Chances are, their presence relates somehow to consecutive shipments. Beyond that, guesswork. Enjoyable guesswork, but guesswork all the same.

Imagine the mess.

Maybe history has forgotten that they had nine regional stamping centres....

That's what the comics show, and that is what the DC tables I plotted show - as well as bunching up, the same issues also often straddle two to three consecutive stamps. If we believe the stamp numbers correlate to consecutive shipment periods (with months being most likely) then that supports the theory that the DC books were returns - different copies taking different times to be returned in the US prior to being amalgamated for shipping to the UK. Some copies make the cut off date, some don't and travel in the next shipment. That makes sense to me. DCs with dual indicia months may have stayed on US shelves twice as long as the monthly publications. That also affects the mix of what arrived and when, in the UK. The only certainties we have currently, to my reading, are those that the comics themselves provide. Unless, of course, you have some new info Rich....

Yes, I posted it to show that the ink did transfer. The massive absence of examples indicates that they must have had drying time and puts the scale of the operation into focus as you said. That was one big table they had in Leicester, wasn't it

I love that

I've gathered snippets like these below, often telling different stories for different times. We might be able to lock down a process for, say 1961, but it doesn't follow that the same thing was happening in 1963 or 68. Things change, processes are fine tuned and improved. Recollections and evidence of a specific event or time may be indicative of just that time.

The first T&P stamps were numbered, but unbranded: When T&P added branding to their stamps, they retained the numbering: That doesn't sound like a nice to have to me - it clearly served a purpose and that purpose was sufficiently important for it to be retained when the stamps were updated.

You could speculate that the possibility of 'bunching' - a run of issues turning up in the same shipment - might have something to do with the stamp numbering. That number one in the four images above tells someone that those four books all arrived at the same time. But that assumes that they did of course - attributing sequential stamp numbers to sequential shipments is just our collective theory in this thread. If it were the case though, for the sake of argument, what would the benefit of that knowledge be to anyone, anyway?

Who is Number One!?

Yes they can Well, Charltons always do, I find. Ask questions, that is. "Why do you keep buying us?" is one of them. I don't remember. I didn't pay one seven hundred and fiftieth of the attention then that I pay now. I just bought the fers and loved them. It was me and them. No groups, no fanzines, no chats with anybody else. The stories, covers and art was all I was interested in back in the day, and apart from a spell with my brother, comics have always been a solitary pleasure. It's only about the last 10-12 years that I've been obsessing over physical attributes, differences, production and UK related distribution.

Both of them!

It's a good question, Rich. But before I speculate on it, never apologise - even in jest - for posting this stuff. It's not hijacking, or repetition. It's a frankly stunning level of analysis that you bring, and it is right at home in this thread, as far as I am concerned. Post more of it, if anything, more often (remember when we first got talking, and I told you you'd be an expert one day if you kept up the level of analysis and questioning you started out with? Well you've surpassed anything I've done by a country mile in this area. For goodness sake, write a book and stop wasting your talent in this online ephemeral graveyard). What I like to do, and have always done with comic research, is gather the evidence first. I often say, "let the comics tell the story" because they quite often do. Here, the comics tell part of the story, clearly. They tell us that DC's arrived from cover dates October 1959, more or less consistently, with 9d T&P cover stamps that bear a clear 1-9 sequential recurring numbering pattern. I've plotted tables that show that the pattern more or less followed a monthly cycle. And I've plotted tables that appear to show like for like dated Marvels appearing to be numbered at a different interval to DC. And I've plotted Charlton stamped copies, of which I now have a very clear and consistent picture on, and which add a different dimension again to the mix. But once you get past that set of physical data, everything else is total speculation. It's not that hard to take an educated punt at how a DC comic, produced in the USA, could physically arrive in the UK and be stamped and distributed. But we don't know really, do we, how it happened and how consistent it was procedurally across the piece and at different stages following those early first arrivals. And for different publishers. So I for one, am looking forward to seeing what you have unearthed, Rich. Maybe the 1-9 system was something to do with invoicing. The UKPVs must have been ordered to a defined contractual volume, with records and payment based upon them. Being returns, with volumes dependant on US sales success, the DC books would need to be counted. Maybe T&P counted all the numbers and invoiced DC against that figure. They stamped a monthly delivery with a number from 1-9 and then counted them. Something like that, maybe.