Albert Tatlock

On 10/25/2023 at 12:07 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Why wouldn't cents priced copies satisfy that shipping test?

Exacty.

On 10/22/2023 at 12:17 PM, Malacoda said:

Yes, I assumed he was an enterprising individual who bought comics and books from a Brummie distributor like the Golds did in London rather than an actual rep, but maybe that's a more blurred line than I think it is. 

I'm never too sure what Miller's distribution network was like.  They had the comics printed all over the shop (Basingstoke and as far afield as Ireland) but it's been said that they never had a distribution network to compete with the likes of DC Thomson. 

Don't forget that the Pemberton boys were distributing reprint comics too, primarily westerns and other stuff licensed from Dell. 

This was quoted as very early 1950s, the dark ages as far as our research goes.

3 for a shilling is a good discount on the cover price of 6d, and presumably Comic Man would still have room for manouvre, as, according to Ralph Gold, Millers, and presumably their competitors, supplied the trade at 2d per comic.

The drinkers in the hostelry depicted would, in the Coronation year of 1953, have been able to wet their whistles for less than 2 shillings a pint, so 3 comics for the nipper would only mean half a pint or so less down the hatch

And a packet of 10 cigs (although packets of 5 were also available) would cost about the same as a pint.

Nobody back then could have enjoyed their pint without a frequent drag on a (usually untipped) coffin nail.

Junior presumably paid little heed to the nicotine stained edges of his literature of choice.

Yes, the bloke hawking comics round the pub was mentioned by Ralph Gold in his autobiog.

That was in London, but maybe Miller's tentacles extended as far as the watering holes of the Black Country.

Possibly these were the British reprints from T & P, though. That would have been before T & P began importing the real deal.

On 10/20/2023 at 1:36 PM, Malacoda said:

You're just trying to get me to do this, aren't you?

 

Her whalebone corset is even tighter than Ethel's.

On 10/19/2023 at 12:48 AM, Malacoda said:

It would have been a fun nod to the scandalous (and unaired in the US) episode if C&B had created their Hellfire Club as opponents for the Avengers and not the Xmen. 

And Diana Rigg's first name was Enid.

Maybe she was wise to go with Diana, Enid does not project the appropriate vibe for an Amazonian beater-up of baddies.

Imagine confessing to your fellow hoodlums, to the accompaniment of guffaws, that your black eye and bent nose were inflicted by a slip of a girl by the name of Enid.

On 10/19/2023 at 9:54 PM, themagicrobot said:

There are mad people on UToob that love to colourize black and white stuff.

They can’t comprehend that for us for the first twenty years of our lives the world actually was in black and white.

Don't forget that I myself only existed in black and white until 1969.

Except for my cap, that was grey.

A natty shade of grey, though.

On 10/18/2023 at 9:37 PM, themagicrobot said:

By the way, spot the deliberate mistake..

Was it that Stan was clueless about UK TV and didn’t realise that The Avengers already existed and were secret agents here

Original was in black and white?

On 10/19/2023 at 12:48 AM, Malacoda said:

It would have been a fun nod to the scandalous (and unaired in the US) episode if C&B had created their Hellfire Club as opponents for the Avengers and not the Xmen. 

Original was black and white?

On 10/16/2023 at 10:30 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

There's a T&P / Miller distribution summary here Albert (as well as my summary on page 1 of this thread):

Here's my #1

Another Archie, this one from Miller.

I must confess that I am not up to speed with Archie stuff, so not sure whether this has been featured before.

It is an early T & P stamped example, cover date and indicia date September 1959.

On 10/13/2023 at 1:16 AM, Malacoda said:

I've no idea how I stumbled onto any of these places, but given my mania for comics, I probably asked in every magic shop, junk shop, booksellers, travel agent, launderette, bookmakers, fish and chip shop.... 

That's where you fell down.

Jumble sales, advertised in your local paper, or on the notice boards outside the library, church and so on could have had you jumping for joy if you hit them at the right time and place.

Still worth checking out, just in case.

On 10/12/2023 at 5:53 PM, themagicrobot said:

To discover a DC comic dated before 1963 when I began seriously collecting them in 1965 was like finding an ancient antique even though it was a mere four or five years old. Yet, with their colourful covers they had survived in greater numbers than the originally far more plentiful UK newsprint comics of a similar age.  It was different for the hardback UK Annuals which still exist in reasonable numbers to this day. A relative gave me this 1951 Dandy Annual in 1966. It looked positively prehistoric and it was a window into a long-gone world.

 

 

 

I think that in one's childhood and youth, one's interaction with the wider world is, by necessity, limited.

As the child matures, he will discover other avenues that simply had not occurred to him previously.

Where to search for out of date comics, for example, could be gained then only by experience.

I was aware of a couple of local street markets, but had no idea how to locate any more. A chance overheard conversation between two housewives on my bus back from school alerted me to another, and as soon as I arrived home, I jumped on my bicycle and paid it a visit. This would have been close to, or even after, 5pm, by which time its present-day counterpart would be deserted, but back then the stallholders put in a full shift.

That particular market proved to be a source of many future acquisitions, but I had not the presence of mind to seek out the market superintendent, or even a stallholder, who could with ease have provided me with a list of similar venues.

Eventually, by trial and error, I mastered the knack of hunting down my quarry, but my earlier naivete meant that there were gaps I could not fill until mail-order dealers made their appearance, asking prices far above the shabby, but cornucopian, second-hand outlets. , 

On 10/12/2023 at 11:30 AM, themagicrobot said:

A Timmy from March 1959

When I was a nipper, the oldest item in my collection for a while was a TTTG dated May 1959. It was surely a T & P latecomer.

I only hung onto it because it was (to me, at least), so ancient.

Finding anything pre-dating the last days of 1959 was just about impossible with the limited sources of supply I had at the time.

Even the ubiquitous DC Thomson stuff only turned up in dribs and drabs before cover date 1958.

I ended up with a good run of The Topper from the late 1950s and early 1960s, likewise my brother with his stack of Beezers, but they were all consigned to the flames in commemoration of the downfall of Catesby, Fawkes and their associates.

I had, I felt, outgrown such childish frippery. Little did I know that the bug that had bitten me was not deceased, only dormant, and my interest was rekindled in 1965 on discovering a copy from 1960 that I still remembered.

Of course, I had the sense not to perform an auto-da-fe with my comic books, as they were then dubbed to distinguish them from mere comics, the weekly British ones, as the American ones had a definite resale value at second-hand outlets, which scorned to stock the worthless kiddies' stuff.

On 10/11/2023 at 12:32 AM, Kevin.J said:

There is no duty but it doesnt stop Border force seizing maybe 1 in 5 of everything I have coming in, even though the commodity code is clearly written.

I always claim and get a refund but before you even know its seized, Parcel Force bail it out and you have to pay their fees under ransom of they will return it to sender and you have just paid 100 quid to ship it, so have no choice but to pay them and then claim, then they can charge up to about 20 quid for their service, you can claim that back too but its a lengthy process, so far so good this year, but I havent been buying that much.

They also always blame the sender, I usually get a pic of the package before sent and there is nothing at all wrong with it.

If anyone has their package seized, send me a PM and I will give you info on what to do.

Notice how there is no telephone number, email address or public counter for Border Force.

I am sure that some people just pay it and its going straight in someones pocket as fiddle.

F$@cking Bastiches!!!!

 

 

What I find baffling about Customs duties is that they make a charge, and then put VAT on top of it.

So you are being taxed for the privilege of having been taxed.

Surely, as HMRC are the recipients of the original charge, the VAT charged to the customer should be MINUS, not PLUS.

But I am not holding my breath.

On 10/8/2023 at 6:58 PM, LowGradeBronze said:

Wonder how your haul would be viewed by customs nowadays. There could be a good bit of duty and tax to pay on it....yikes!

No duty as yet on books and magazines, but Government functionaries are always on the lookout for further sources of revenue, so it may come, sooner than you think.

Quite right, too, they have a lot of worthy causes to support.

What reasonable person would object to being asked to put his hand in his pocket to fund the inflation-proof pensions of retired rear admirals and the like.

Here is a £sd Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika stamp with Her Maj on, but I think that K, U and T went decimal before 1974.

I had one with a picture of a giraffe on when I were but a lad, possibly with shillings and pence, but the versions I can find online now are all priced in cents.

Is it possible that the anachronistic 2 shilling stamped items were reimported into the UK after failing to sell somewhere overseas which was still pre-decimal?

I have examples dated as late as 1974.

On 9/29/2023 at 5:46 PM, OtherEric said:

Or my last name of one of my favorite SF writers.

 

Yes, not a bad little scribbler, Mr PKD.

On 9/29/2023 at 5:24 PM, OtherEric said:

If you keep carping about this we may need to start calling you Albert Haddock instead... 

I know, I know.

We have to avoid the anagram of carp, just like the forename of Mr Turpin, which currently escapes me.

Think it's the same as Mr Dastardly, though.

On 9/29/2023 at 12:31 AM, Kevin.J said:

If I de-boarded all the carp I dont really want,

Tell us about the ones that got away, Kev.

On 9/29/2023 at 12:31 AM, Kevin.J said:

If I de-boarded all the carp I dont really want,

So you collect mounted fish, too?

On 9/28/2023 at 10:54 PM, Malacoda said:

And the crazy price, probably.  Two years ago I was watching the price of silver age bags go up before my eyes, so I bought 500 to keep me going. Since then they've gone from 13p each to 18p each (which is a total con - modern size comic bags are 10p each, but who wants to bag those).  

Oh how I wish I'd bought a few thousand Mylites 5 years ago. 

Don't you realise you are driving the planet to ruin?

Forget plastic polluting bags.

Store your books in recycled brown paper, ecologically sound, envelopes.

Or just go back to the shoebox solution of our faraway youth.

Your grandchildren will salute your memory.

Going back a long way, I remember Jerry Bails counselling others to follow his lead, as he sold off his collection after committing its content to microfilm, not knowing at the time that microfilm is at least as prone to age-related degradation as cheap newsprint-type paper.

But they don't look quite as good in brown paper, do they?

On 9/28/2023 at 3:17 PM, Kevin.J said:

A few months ago I went into FP here for the first time in maybe 3 years and asked for silver & golden age backing boards, they said they dont carry things like that, I got the impression that the dude didnt even know what I meant 

For balance I went to the Travelling man next door and they didnt have any either, said they had been waiting for the supplier for about 2 years to get them in again, I said you need a new supplier, he laughed and said yeah 

There is really no point in me going to these type of shops anymore, no back issues, no storage supplies, just toys and games stuff, no thanks.

I came out the shop and noticed a new shop across the road "Comic book store and cafe" sounds great right? went in, couldnt see any comics asked the dude serving tea & coffee where the comic stuff was and he points me to a tiny rack of about 50 old graphic novels 

Had to buy the backing boards on ebay and pay crazy postage 

I have a stack of old posters, on quite heavy paper, A1 size, too many to sell during my few remaining years, so I get a local print shop to guillotine them up into just the exact size for the bags, then I use 2 of the resulting pieces, face to face so the blank outside is showing, in place of backing boards. They are not as sturdy as the bespoke backing boards, but they will do nicely for items of lower value, certainly for the books I propose to sell.

If I ever did run out, I would go to a local paper merchant and buy a quantity of suitably sized blank paper, board or card. They should be able, for a small extra fee, or possibly no extra charge to guillotine them to any required size.

Then all I would have to do is transport them back to my place of abode.

Maybe worth your while ringing a local paper merchant, they will be delighted to give you a quotation, free of charge or obligation.

Or you could just carry on lining the pockets of the fat cats in the higher echelons of Royal Mail.

On 9/27/2023 at 11:28 PM, Kevin.J said:

Thats a real tough book, I am complete from #90 onwards bar that book, it never turns up much and always goes higher than I expect when it does, maybe one day

Good luck, Kev,

You only live once, and it's only money, so leave the underbidders trailing in your wake.

8d was a lot of dosh then, but someone bit the bullet.

And if you tire of it, you should be able to find someone even dafter than your good self.

On 9/18/2023 at 2:13 PM, Malacoda said:

"Here, let me just stamp that for you"

"No thanks, I'll take it how it is"

"Are you sure? You won't be able to bring it back."

"Oh go on then.  What's the harm?"

 

 

 

Another bargain at only 8d, but I reckon they could have got the full price of 9d if they had refrained from stamping it.

There is another stamp further down, somebody or other's books, it says, but I cannot make it out.

If I manage to decipher it, I will pop along and see what else is on the shelf. Can't go wrong at that price.