Albert Tatlock

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to complete a table with all stamps from all publishers from Action # 1 to date. As always, should you or any member of your team be caught or killed, CGC will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This post will self-destruct in five seconds

Dunno how many super-heroes Wolves and West Ham have got between them, but probably no need to remove shoes and socks.

As much as the Romans did for the PFJ.

It will be at least as large as Stonehenge. Spinal Tap version.

As you have already detected, my minces are playing me up a bit, so I will take a back seat on this. Thanks for volunteering, I will chip in for a statue of you when the work is complete.

There was no shortage of the Marvels just before and just after the hiatus, they all appeared on cue. I reckon the others outside the Oct-Dec gap turned up later, being unsold Stateside copies someone bunged David Gold's way for peanuts. Can we do an approximate census on the issues the 10d and 1/- stamps appeared on? The Oct-Dec issues probably outnumber them by a substantial margin, I think, but until the numbers are crunched we will not be sure. I would say an initial mini-flood, followed by a diminishing trickle. Surely there could not have been an official contract between Marvel and Gold Star. T & P would have brought in their learned friends. Cease and desist forthwith letters are always at one's elbow in a legal office.

Could the ASM # 40 have a blurred version of the double stamp below, which was posted back on page 170 of this thread?

Here it is again.

I originally posted my ASM # 42 back in November last year, will try to dig it out again.

There is a vertical line there that may be the 1, but there are other straight lines. The normal one has a pretty empty circle apart from the 1/-. Maybe a clearer example will be found.

Tried, but can't find it, they need a bigger sign. My pal here says he'll take me tomorrow.

Hmmmmm. Dunno 'bout that. There seem to be some straight lines inside the outer circle. Maybe a case of seeing what you expected to see, like Schiaparelli's canals.

My ASM # 42 is a shilling circle. I have taken a close look at my ASM # 40, and it has a stamp, but too faint and fuzzy to make out.

Have we had this one? I forget which page the table of 10d and 1/- stamps is on.

Three theories: 1) These are some of the A & G items that the buyer is putting on the market, having bought them specifically to split up the lot and make a profit. 2) These are some of the items that the buyer found surplus to requirements and is now offloading, having decided to keep the rest. 3) These are a fresh batch being sold by Ian's family, who have decided not to consign them to A & G this time around. Did anyone at the time notice whether these items were included in the A & G sale? There were a couple of large heavy boxes, but no list. If these are from the A & G sale, they are possibly only a fraction of the original accumulation.

They are indeed from Ian Penman's collection. His name appears on this item:

Wonder whether this lot of fanzines, etc are the leftovers from the Ian Penman collection. No really good stuff there, if they are the Penman items, the choice items have been weeded out. https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/ancient-mariner-auctions/catalogue-id-ancien10004/lot-db39ff2f-fc49-404e-9b7e-afab00e47901

I prefer to think that the 10d oblong stamps were first applied to FF # 56, 57 and the rest of that shoal. The FF # 41 and # 51, I reckon, arrived later, when Goldstar were casting around for supplies after T & P were back up and running. There are quite a few examples of the Oct-Dec 1966 batch, but only oddments of earlier stuff. If Goldstar had been importing before the T & P hiatus, there should be more of their stamps around, also T & P were, at the time, fond of printing 'SOLE DISTRIBUTORS' on their stock, so there would have been repercussions if someone else were muscling in.

There was never a shortage of Marvels of this period until they unexpectedly went AWOL at the end of '66. Dock strikes came and dock strikes went, but the comics always seemed to get through somehow, I used to believe in the dock strike theory, it was prevalent among the little gang in my neck of the woods at the time, as we could think of no other rational explanation, but it has now joined its colleagues phlogiston and Piltdown Man in the dustbin of history.

And their daughter Jacqueline, who ran Ann Summers, survived her father by only a few weeks, passing away last month.

The FF # 51 would have been well out of date when it arrived, the # 41 even more so. Working on the assumption that Goldstar entered the fray when T & P unexpectedly dropped the ball in late '66, only to get their act back together after a couple of months, thereby shutting the porn baron out again, is it reasonable to assume that Mr Gold, having tasted a bit of extra wonga, did not want to leave the arena? I would guess that the out of date stuff was supplied to him by a Stateside scavenger rummaging the unsold warehouse items, but we will probably never fully untangle the history of this episode. Worth keeping an eye out for similar remnants, though.

Has this one cropped up before?

I recall that in one of my local newsagents, the newly-arrived batch of comics was not in a box, but in a little stack tied up with string, with grey cardboard top and bottom. The cardboard almost, but not quite protected the mags from being bitten into by the twine or string. That, however, was a small shop, and the bundle of comics numbered only a few dozen at most. Maybe larger outlets were deemed worthy of the expense of a box.

I have quizzed Mr Google regarding the Postal Act of 1879, and he has informed me thusly: The primary purpose of the 1879 Postal Act, or Mail Classification Act, was to create a distinction between second and third class mail. Material deemed second class could be sent at a cheaper rate of two cents per pound. To qualify, a periodical needed to be numbered and printed at least four times a year, printed in a known location, printed without a bound cover and have a legitimate list of subscribers, among other requirements. The 1879 act was simply meant to clarify and classify what belonged in the four classes of domestic mail. The U.S. Postal Service hoped it would bring additional revenue by limiting second class mail to periodicals. Beyond the cost issues, the act had a more significant effect: By lowering postage for periodicals, circulation in the magazine and newspaper industries exploded, helping spur changes in marketing and communications, as well as society overall. However, second class quickly became the fastest growing mail segment, eclipsing first class, and it soon became a burden on the postal service. To make matters worse the postal service also suspected that much of the mail being sent as second class did not qualify for the rate. So Lois Lane became a burden not only on the Caped Kryptonian, but also on Uncle Sam's revenue-raising efforts. This at a time when the Viet Cong had decided to wage a war of attrition on the decadent Western Imperialistic publications such as those we have been seduced by. No wonder the powers-that-be decided to do away with her subscribers.

This is all increasingly bad news for the completists. First we had our American cousins refusing to believe that the T & P UKPVs were not reprints, then having grudgingly to acknowledge, in the face of mounting evidence, that they were in fact first printings, thereby creating a hole in the collection. Add to that the additional expense of tracking down and purchasing the Miller variants. Then the Australian PVs. Not to mention the Newsstand/Direct sale dichotomy. Now the subscription variants, possibly one for each shore of the Atlantic. Where is it all going to end? The shelves will be groaning.