Albert Tatlock

Certainly did. Not bad, laying out tuppence to get a bob, or even a tanner which is what the street hawkers would ask you for.

Anything to oblige, old chap. From an article by Steve Holland in issue 39 of The Illustrated Comic Journal (Spring/Summer 2002).

If the resupply of the newsagents, etc, was carried out by a T & P rep using his own initiative, then the number on the stamp would be an indication to the rep, not to the shop proprietor. There would be an incentive for the newsagent to keep his shelves clear of slow-moving stock. The more old material removed, the more room there would be for fresh stock, and as it was all SOR, the shopkeeper would be charged only for the difference between new stock added and old stock subtracted. A win-win situation, except for the avid collector vainly trying to fill gaps more than a couple of months or so in the past. I trawled all my local newsagents when I first started collecting, and was over the moon when I found a back issue that had somehow escaped the periodic weeding-out. However, I do remember my uncle having comics and magazines bundled up ready for return, as it saved time. There would be some shopkeepers, maybe, who would rather let the salesman perform this chore.

Merry Christmas one and all! Try to live up to what is expected of us in this season of goodwill, as exemplified by my colleagues below.

https://www.wolfshead.co.uk/top ten comic archive.html

Well, if he never managed to sell anything, there should be some good stuff on the Roadshow. All near mint owing to never having been thumbed through.

....as documented in the intro to JLA Archives Volume 1. Well worth investing in if your pockets are not deep enough for the originals.

T'wiffic. I weally, weally must catch that. More seriously, he ran a comic book shop along with Paul Gambaccini. And his quest to track down the elusive Steve Ditko on the streets of Manhattan is worth another watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfxVO0fLHvA

I know it well. Walking down Green Street you would never guess that a football stadium used to take up much of the other side of the road. A little bit further down, at the corner of Castle Street, next to the church, was a street trading pitch dishing out scarves and badges, etc, to the matchgoers. David Gold's old accomplice, Karren (now Baroness) Brady, used to turn up there on occasion unannounced, to confiscate infringing badges, even though the Hammers shop had no similar items in competition. She scorned to dispatch an underling to do her work. Wonder who she got her brass neck off?

Is it too late to apply for retrospective planning permission? Some pest with a clipboard is probably opening a file.

From David Gold's autobiography: My brother would sell fresh mint – quick and easy to grow - down the market whilst I would be helping my mother to make the garlands, or getting on a bus to the wholesaler to buy comics to sell as we began to add products to our stall. This was a further sign of our entrepreneurial spirit. It wasn’t the regular comics like Beano and Dandy I chose because those could be purchased in any newsagent. Instead I bought the newly available American comics with superheroes like Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and Spiderman. These were the very early imports; colourful and highly collectable. His memory is letting him down, though, as he is talking here about the immediate post-war period, over a decade before Spider-Man made his debut. His sources would have been, as well as the genuine Golden Age articles arriving with US service personnel, the Thorpe & Porter reprints and, more probably, Miller's output. Millers would wholesale to street and market traders. Enterprising locals found a ready stream of customers at their place of employment, some factories had a workforce of thousands. I have an article somewhere which gives Miller's trade prices, will dig it out soon.

The alternative would be that Goldstar negotiated separately with each publisher. My money is on them being sourced through a Stateside wholesaler/distributor who had bought up job lots from various publishers. Only speculation, though, I admit.

Or maybe they knew the batch they had secured was just a one-off.

Looks like Goldstar's participation in distributing for Marvel was a flash in the pan. The oblong stamps only cover 6 months or so, most at end of 1966, and the ones at the tail end, (June 1967 is the latest cover date unearthed so far, I believe) just peter out. This episode gave them a foot in the door, but once the dust had settled, the publishers had to decide who to go with long term. Who was shifting the most units, Goldstar (not a lot), or T & P (quite a few)? With T & P back on their feet, they had the leverage to become once more, as their indicia states 'SOLE distributors for the United Kingdom'. Plus T & P had already got back on track a couple of months before the missing 66ers put in an appearance. Goldstar probably did not attempt to order any more Marvels, maybe they were watching from the sidelines in case an opportunity presented itself in the future. And the fact that other publishers' output display the oblong stamp means, I think, that the shipment or shipments came through a middle man.

If David Gold had known about Frank Dobson's Fantasy Advertiser, he could have got an even nicer little earner, and flogged the lot off at prices up to 7/6d each. His staff would have know all about sending out overpriced magazines in plain brown wrappers. Lovely jubbly!

Makes sense. If the publisher feared that T & P would not be able to pay, the late 66ers would not have been sent as scheduled. What happened to them then? They would have been hawked around to any likely customer. Possibly a few of them were offloaded Stateside, they were cents copies, so they could easily have been filtered in. The ones which eventually made it across the pond were scarce, by my own recollection, and were noted as such in Alan Austin's Price Guides a few years later. I would say that the level of scarcity was, at the time, about the same as the late 1964 batch. Whoever took them would have expected a discount, as they were out of date, but they hit the shelves here at full price. A nice little earner for some East End wide boy. They turned up in exactly the same outlets as the regular supply, I found them in local newsagents, most customers would have been unaware that they had been delayed, only the serious collectors, who had gaps in the collection, would have latched onto that. So why were they so few in number? Maybe Goldstar or whoever were not offered the full shipment, or maybe they decided to take only a fraction of them.

Repeat offender. Next one is a three time loser and goes to the chair.

Stop, thief!. Come back with that stolen cover idea.

............and keep your hands off my stack.

This is disgraceful! To think that the moral fibre of our youth is being undermined by such trash! Probably a Commie plot to bring our proud island to its knees. What we need is a campaign to clean up this sort of filth. When we have got rid of the worst of the worst, maybe we could reassure the public by placing a small stamp in the top right hand corner, to show that the magazine is safe for their children, as well as themselves.

How do you stop the audience walking off with your grails?

Just how many DC and Marvel were in my collection at that point. The figures could go down as well as up, as sometimes I decided to liquidate a title I had become disillusioned with, or conversely, the totals could increase without any purchases being made if I relented and brought some previously banished items back into the fold. With hindsight, of course, I should have clung like a limpet to everything. The collection of one whom the bug has truly bitten should resemble a black hole, once the book has crossed the event horizon, it is there without hope of returning to the outside world.

How cheap did this have to get before it found a home?

Found an old notebook logging purchases from the summer of 1967. First time I came across the missing 66ers was: July 22: Spider-Man 43, X-Men 25 July 26: Avengers 34, FF 56, Suspense 84 July 28: Strange Tales 151, MCIC 6 (1/6d) July 31: Astonish 85, Daredevil 21 August 5: Avengers 33, Spider-Man 42, Thor 133, 134 August 7: FF 57 (bought from a fellow collector, price not noted) August 22: Astonish 86 September 30: X-Man 26 (I had to turn to a fellow collector for that one, and pay 1/3d, I could not find one in the shops) October 9; Daredevil 22 (exchange deal) All other purchases were 10d, so probably the 1/- circle did not appear in my area. They were difficult to find, I had to go far and wide to find scattered copies, usually singly, but at times a batch of up to 6 of the same issue would appear. I bought all I could find, as they could be immediately moved on at a premium.

Fred made an approach for his top shelf stuff, but our agent advised us to turn it down, and besides, Minnie was already under contact to Paul Raymond. And Len had problems of his own. Still waiting for an improved offer from Fred.