Albert Tatlock

If a retailer, would they not bear the stamp or sticker of that outlet, even if clearly second-hand? My guess is that they were bought up as a cheap job lot, then sold on to market traders and the like. That there was still a bit of mileage in them is evidenced by this one a couple of pages back with a PBS stamp, plus the Hot Wheels one at the top of this page..

But we do not know on which date the diamond stamp was applied. Not close to the original date when it was stamped by T & P. I reckon. Many of the other diamond stamps are on post-decimal examples, so my guess is that this one had been remaindered for a few years when it was taken up by the mystery buyer who also bought a whole batch of other out of date stuff.

Cannot see rest of this chart, do you reckon you could post it all, so we know which of the little blighters are still dodging us.

It is mine now, all mine d'you hear, and will be treasured forever. It turned up in a bundle of nondescript stuff that has only just reached me. I said a while back that I had never come across this title (Flippity) or Porkchops. If I had I would just have riffled past in search of something more to my liking. My early collecting activity was quite narrowly focused. Then I took to thinking that Peter Porkchops sounded familiar, and just about convinced myself that I had seen one. But now I have come to the conclusion that I must have been fondly remembering the character as depicted in the in -house ads, as shown below. So the search goes on.

Quite likely that at least one will turn up, ditto Adventure # 265, which I had in the mid 1960s. Probably the best candidate for next earliest stamped copy to come to light is Unexpected # 43.

When blizzards sweep through Hell...............

If only, but..............

Another piece of the jigsaw........ And a couple that have surfaced before, but are still lesser-spotted.......

No cause for concern here, Blackhawk has previous experience to draw on. It's deja vu all over again. And both times he's lost his hat.

At the time TTA # 13 was published, Groot was a character of no significance. The same as TTA # 27. What if the first Ant Man appearance had featured a different scientist, not Henry Pym, but with roughly the same powers? Then TTA # 27 would be worth the same today as # 26 and # 28. The subject under discussion here has more to do with human psychology than the comic book industry. Why pay many times more for issue A of a title than issue B, when both are circulating in equal quantities? FOMO has not yet been mentioned, but it is surely a driver.

Here are a couple of pictures of the old and the new wings of the Showroom. Probably.

From an old copy of ICJ. Bryon is circulating his readership in an attempt to gather material to reproduce, it seems. £4 to borrow each item of interest. I am not sure how many he would need to sell to break even, not a lot, I suppose. More of a hobby than a business, I reckon.

There are some strange things happening here. Consider the case of Tales To Astonish # 13. Before the release of Guardians Of The Galaxy, # 13 was worth exactly the same as # 12 and #14. That changed almost overnight. Who decided that # 13 should go up in value? The story is a run-of the mill Lee/Kirby pre-superhero, Groot is a very minor character, and the supply is not out of line with the others of the period. What made fans decide that they could no longer live without a copy of TTA# 13? And who took advantage of it? As previously mentioned, greed and speculation are an intrinsic part of the dynamic here. Any way of finding out whether anyone involved in the production of GOTG hoarded TTA # 13? If not, they must be kicking themselves.

I was in the Corn Exchange in the '80s. The chances of picking up a bargain at a street market had fizzled out by then. The reference to the 60s and 70s were when it was still possible to unearth, say FF # 1-10 and early Spider-Man, etc, but by the 80s those days were just about over, although there was still fairly recent stuff (say 5 to 10 years old) that could be sold on. When Frank Dobson's Fantasy Advertiser started to be widely read, say 1967 onwards, the second-hand sources began to dry up, as dealers were buying up everything of value and issuing lists. Even new comics which were in short supply on the newsstands would reappear in FA at a hefty mark-up. Frank typically charged 3/6d for Marvels just a few months old. Still, if you kept your eyes open, it was possible that a one owner collection would suddenly appear on a local market, but you had to be quick off the mark.

But parking was a problem. No dedicated loading bay, yellow peril on prowl, pencil poised. You had to be quick in and quick out, not easy if you had any quantity of stock to load/unload. I got around it by arriving at crack of dawn, before restrictions kicked in. I think the comic shop concentrated on imports, probably from Titan. No back issues, I seem to remember, so not on my regular search list.

At the time I moved in, the Corn Exchange was a little neglected and in decline. Rents, as a consequence, were remarkably low for a city centre location, which was its major attraction for me. The neighbouring room was occupied by a translation agency, who offered me his slightly less conveniently situated room so he could have two adjacent rooms. Once he offered to help with moving my stock, and, crucially, cross my palm with silver, I agreed. However, I left not long after, but it was a very convenient facility for storage at the time. I toyed with the idea of taking a stall in the market area downstairs, but the core customers there were vinyl freaks and patchouli soaked members of alternative society, for whom my offerings would have been of little interest. There was a comic shop on the outside at the front, below ground level, whose name escapes me. but I cannot remember making a purchase there. Occasionally the trestle tables in the market area would throw up a few older silver age items, but nothing major that I saw. The best sources at the time were still the local markets. In the 1960s and early 1970s there was still a chance of picking up what today would be termed a Key, or even a Grail, terms which I believe I have never uttered aloud, old school as I am. The markets had a ridiculously high churn rate, you knew that next week there would be fresh stock, which was not always the case with the second-hand shops. Why sell off your surplus comics to a little side street establishment when you could visit the market, which was open Saturday and at least one other weekday, and had thousands of customers, and probably had other basic items that you needed anyway. So I kept up a routine of visiting as many markets as I could get to every Saturday, and any junk shops and so on that lay on my route. Those days will never come again, I know, the public is too savvy, but the memories I have are seared into my brain, I can still remember where I first saw many of the additions to my early collection, at usually 6, 4, or even 3 old pence.. Later, it is a blur, when I was buying the current issues as they hit the shops at the prevailing retail rates. When I get time, I have promised myself that will compile a register of the original sources of the 1960 to 1963 material that I assembled, and, in many cases, foolishly dispersed, before my fast approaching dotage overtakes me.

Here are a couple of shops from back in the day. Paramount was run by a chap called Les, a very knowledgeable bloke. It was called Atlantic Crossing at one time. His brother helped out on the till, even though he had prosthetic hands. House On The Borderland was run by one Dave Britton. He also had something to do with a shop on Peter Street, just along from the Free Trade Hall, and next door to the old St Peter's Tavern, where I watched the Rumble In The Jungle live as it took place. The landlord, Frank from Macclesfield locked the door at midnight or so, as was his wont, and we all went downstairs and carried on drinking. Dave had to break rocks or stitch mailbags for a while, as he had published something that the judge harrumphed about.

Yes, I am pretty sure you are right, 1974 is too early, but there were definitely a few by 1980, which is about the time I picked up that heap of stuff from t'old mill.

Don't remember him being there, just as well, I suppose, he would have had me doubling round the block for having the crease in my trousers out of line. I did rent a room on the first floor of the Corn Exchange in the 1980s, where I stored my stock of old T shirts, while I waited for someone to invent ebay. With hindsight I should have ransacked every market bookstall for miles around for comics and stashed them in there.

The car has a suffix H, so first registered in 1969/70. That bloke peering into the window will be in the old folks' home now, if he is not brown bread. Still, he was a snappy dresser in his day. His plastic shopping bag is probably full of personal grooming supplies. That's where reading second-hand comics can get you.

...and here it is

Short boxes and long boxes were an invention yet to be thought of. The places I am talking of stored their mags in bog standard cardboard receptacles, which had contained anything from bottles of bleach (by necessity at the sturdy end of the spectrum) to crisps and sweets (much flimsier). Anything, in fact, which was free. Sometimes they were just hauled up from a shelf under the counter, usually not visible, in case they took away display space from the more lucrative offerings of interest to the (ahem) more mature clientele. But Odyssey 7 was at the University, at least a mile from Victoria. The Hanging Ditch shop was much smaller, but was adjacent to the Cathedral, right next to Victoria Station and the Corn Exchange. The Corn Exchange, until it was forced to close after the 1996 bombing, had .a sort of market inside where comics could sometimes be found, but it catered more for other collectables, model railways, etc plus vintage clothing. The traders there came and went, it was a pretty eclectic sort of place, but never attracted any high end dealers who were to be found more in the nearby Royal Exchange, which was also within the radius of the blast and had to be abandoned because of water getting in.

I will unearth a few and check, but it might take me a while to burrow and delve that deep.

There were plenty of second-hand bookshops which also dealt in comics, but the comic specialists (I too remember House On The Borderland) were a little later. They had the effrontery to charge above cover price, and even so, they could not have stayed in business without associated stock lines, sci-fi, trade paperbacks and so on. I remember one in the arcade next to Victoria Station, now long since demolished and redeveloped, whose surly proprietor had latched onto the fact that his comic buying customers would still fork out cover price for old comics. Whatever it said on the cover was what he asked for and obtained, never a penny more or a penny less. He would not even budge when I showed him that the copy of FF # 8 he was demanding 9d for had the middle pages missing. I capitulated, and my coppers disappeared into his till.

But it could not have been serving that purpose in 1974 or later, as shillings and old pence had been abolished a few years previously. Maybe it is a prank of Mr Mxyzptlk, who is hooting with laughter from the 5th dimension as he watches us chasing our tails.