Malacoda

Is there a special subset of house ads for books that were never actually published?

The first Marvel comic I ever owned was Mighty World of Marvel 138. I mention this because tonight I finished my MWOM collection. I only needed 2 and I just got them. Of course, I always imagined that if I completed my collection I would run round the playground showing off to everyone. It's now 48 years later...and, well, basically, you guys are the playground.

Cool. Love the dual Aus & UK pricing. Some of these have UK, Aus, NZ and SA pricing.

As ever, the Inedible Bulk is asking all the right questions. Love the Green Shield stamp, btw.

This is something I try not to think about. Whenever I'd go through a box of old comics looking for (relatively recent) Marvel comics, I'd always been disappointed at all the old 'rubbish' I had to wade through whilst panning for Marvels. I can only imagine what treasures I dismissed because they didn't have the right logo.

I used to cycle round a variety of dusty old shops as I'm sure everyone on this thread did. When you went into a new high street you could sniff out the shop that might have a box of silver age gold from half a mile away. Particularly if you had dust allergies. My favourites were Books, Bits & Bobs in Kingston and the intriguingly named West Middlesex Books And Things (not least intriguing because it was on Middlesex's eastern border with Richmond) but the one that always annoyed me was Marion Pitman Books down by Twickenham Green, because despite just having a few random comics in a tatty box on a shelf, they actually knew the value of the comics. B'stards.

What a time to be alive! (seriously). I agree, the combo of madly high prices, a world that collectors can genuinely nerd up over and movies that are undeniably brilliant - even if you hate them, you can't argue with the production values & effects - has really enabled us to finally stumble, blinking and coughing, into the light.

Sorry to hear you're a lost soul, mate. Moving out of London is a real one way ticket, isn't it? I was lucky enough to hang on. In my teens and early 20's, when I walked down my local high street, I would be constantly nodding and saying hello to people I was at school with (or my siblings were). The amount of times I bump into an old school friend now is literally never.

You went full nerd. Everyone knows you never go full nerd, man.

Kingston (upon Thames) had one that ran all week. I can't remember a bookseller, but there was a record seller who had some incredibly rare and expensive stuff. I bought some great picture discs from him.

Oops, missed that. Apologies. Yes, Duncan confirms and, ironically, so does the GCD.

Indeed. Hats off to BC. Great stuff. He has repeated the thing I did complete with indicias - and also put in Not Brand Echh and Tales of Asgard which I missed off. Just for completism: Two Gun Kid, Kid Colt & Strange Tales finished their runs at ECP in March, March & May 1968 respectively, so didn't directly flip to World. However Two Gun Kid was resurrected at Sparta in July 1970 (no #93), Kid Colt was resurrected at Sparta in November 1969 (#140) and Strange Tales did exactly what it said on the tin, finishing at ECP in May 1968, does that bonkers thing where the numbering carries onto Doc's own title with #169 directly in June (still at ECP), finally flips to Sparta with issue #177, then gets cancelled at issue #183 (with no indication this would be the last issue, btw), and then ST gets resurrected under that title, and picks up the old numbering (like a horror movie franchise being rebooted and retconned) with #169 in September 1973, and goes through a wild ride with Brother Voodoo, the Golem & Warlock before ending up with a short run of Doc Strange reprints and getting cancelled at #188 in November 1976. At Sparta, obviously. So, technically, Two Gun Kid, Kid Colt and Strange Tales did all flip from ECP to WCP, but they took the scenic route. Rawhide Kid took the more obvious way and flipped at #68 (ECP #67 Dec 68, WCP #68 Feb 69). Again, hats off to BC. Not Brand Echh. Damn!

Hang on, Gary, are you saying that Walthamstow is not a sun-drenched seaside paradise? The Walthamstow Marketing Board would definitely beg to differ.

The original is a Dell from Dec 1956 to Feb 1957, so likely 1957 earliest unless they were super speedy with the plates. According to the GCD, World published 20 issues of this Giant Comic in 1956 and 1957, so assuming it was 20 monthly issues in a possible 24 month span, this one would have to be somewhere between August and November of 1957, which would be the right moment to be advertising the Xmas annuals for Little Johnny & Auntie Doreen. Given, as you say, the interior ad is for October, that eliminates Oct & Nov, so my money is on September 1957. (Why do I feel like I just took all the fun out of that?)

That was just asking for it, wasn't it?

It could be, but I think it more definitely illustrates the other he was talking about, the months where he would suddenly get a whole run of a series coming in at the same time. Your table displays a pretty remarkable example of that.

I actually quoted this site previously for the article about Liverpool to NY sea crossing, which is fascinating in its own right. It didn't occur to me that things like bills of lading would be there. https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/whatson/merseyside-maritime-museum/exhibition/liverpool-new-york-only-way-cross

I was there about 7 years after you, but I seem to remember buying Asterix and Tintin books at the time. And riding a steam train. The mountain of stock could also have been at the rep's lock up waiting for its second chance. The chap I was talking to recently got his seconds in holiday shops in Heacham and Hunstanton, which are also north coast of Norfolk (at the same time you were there).

Right. It's true, it's all Port of NY Authority, so it's an artificial distinction between NY & NJ, either one could have been a contender (see what I did there?)

Agree, Albert, but I think the word 'through' implies right through and out the other side. Keeping in mind that there were thousands of local wholesalers & distributors, those stamps could be wholesalers. It would still explain why you get different stamp dates on different issues of the same comic. The problem is that we don't know what a correlative number would be i.e. if over 10 years we collectively found X number of stamps it would suggest wholesalers, but if we found (much greater number) Y it would suggest retailers. We have no idea what X and Y are. We also don't know if the numbers we've seen of those prove they were UK distributed copies at all. I've only seen dozens of them, not hundreds, so they could have been brought over here by dealers & collectors.

This is really interesting. Thank you. So far, I've looked for people, news articles and adverts which has been quite a hunt. I didn't imagine there would be a ready source of company data, which I assumed would be kept confidential at the time and destroyed after 7 years. OK, on we go.

My money would be on Liverpool in the 60's (if I were exporting to Leicester) although Tilbury is a good shout (main port for the importation of paper these days). Why do you reckon Baltimore is more likely than Newark?

I agree here too. I know we are healthily sceptical of the statement of ownership numbers (esp. given the famous comment by friend Giordano) but: (a) he was only talking about Charlton, which was pretty, you know, mobby (b) I don't believe the more corporate / reputable (sorry, Steve) publishers would have done that (c) if the numbers were all made up, how come they are so amazingly consistent from title to title, year to year, publisher to publisher? It's like me saying to you 'pick a number between 1 and 500,000' and then guessing the number you're thinking of. ( It was 317, 753 by the way). (d)) If they were going to put all that effort into creating credible fake numbers, it would have been easier to just publish the real ones (e) what would be the need to fake them? Every month, they got a number from Sparta which said how many were printed. I'm sure the actual numbers of sell through were based on estimates because the real numbers would not have been finalised, but why wouldn't you base them the last 6 months of actual data? Much easier. There is no way that accounts / sales data was NEVER being collated. Maybe this is what DG meant by 'we made them up'. Now, if we accept from the distribution perspective, that literally 40% of the print run never got sold (let's say 200k out of 500k) let's remember that Sparta were sending the whole lot out to the regional and local wholesalers - it wasn't like everything went to the Marvel or DC depot where an army of Ethels (or Flo Steinbergs) broke them all out into parcels for each wholesaler. They went straight to the wholesalers. Does it then seem likely that every copy was religiously sent out to retailers? We know from the sales data that the dealers had no possibility of selling them and, in the case of news vendors, precious little space to even display them. It seems more likely to me they were stockpiled at wholesalers. Another point may be that they came back unopened from the retailers. The news vendor was compelled to take what the wholesaler wanted to give him, but if he didn't even display the comics, would he really open the the bundle and meticulously tear half the cover off each one? I imagine more likely the bundle just came back unopened? I mention this last point because it seems to me that there's quite a dense grey area between the wholesaler and the retailer and your point about wholesalers and Albert's about retailers both live in that greyness. I agree with you that they were probably unused wholesale.

I agree. Given the numbers that were needed for the UK (10k per title maybe?), it would have been financial lunacy to transport that amount of returns thousands of miles from the four corners of the US when there would have been easily that amount within striking distance of Port Newark Elizabeth.

To respectfully counter: in the case of Marvel, I don't think any of them were returns, they were all bespoke batches that went straight to T&P including the cents/stamped ones. In the case of DC, surely the long scatter pattern of bunching & multi-batching (the same issue turning up repeatedly over several months & multiple consecutive issues turning up together in the same month) indicates that there was something of this ilk going on e.g. every issue of Superman 345 (Steve, proper example please) rolled off the presses at the same time, so how did they end up turning up over successive months in the UK? ( I agree as you say that a lot of the stuff we accord the status of a fact is just reinforced supposition, but the sequential stamping catalogued by our Intrepid Founder and the memories of so, so many collectors confirm that pattern).