Malacoda

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You enjoy your Charltons. My work here is done. I've got people in Oadby to upset.

When I pick up a silver age comic, the first thing I do is give it the nasal appraisal.

Right, but AA is AF. It's AA from 1-6, then gets retitled as AAF from 7 to 14 and then AF for the last issue. So, if we're being that precise, Albert posted AAF not AF. This is weird, it sounds like we're disagreeing with each other when we're actually agreeing. Nevertheless, your point is well taken. By this point, T&P were sweeping the table and the rest of them are PV's.

Bless you for checking. I think it's interesting that even Duncan picked up on the anomalous stamps on that one. However, no one lists it as rare, LD or ND so the whole shipment must have rocked up at some point.

Indeed. Even then. I've owned 4 copies of Avengers 96 over the years, every one of them water damaged, and clearly these were not ballast.

No, right, this is exactly what I meant....they were Miller indicias but not PV's. We're on the same (inside cover) page.

I always assumed the famous ballast copies were stamped by UK importers or newsagents, so this would be one of those? That said, I think the first few AF's that were imported by Millers were not PV's. Steve will set me straight, hopefully.

I agree. My theory is that T&P were going to replace the big splotchy stamps with the neater, smaller less intrusive ones (on which I'm sure the ink dried a lot faster - you certainly don't see anything like the same mess on those ones). The obvious moment to buy all new stamps was when the inevitable price change came, however when it came 3 things happened: 1) it happened fast around the election and 2) it was based on a tax increase that was supposed to be temporary and 3) having to prepare for the increase without a date, T&P went over to cents issues and stamping in advance. This meant that there was a huge increase in the amount of comics needing stamping and presumably more Ethels were hired. They therefore used both the new stamps and the old ones in tandem while they had both Marvel and DC to contend with and then when Marvel went back to PV's, they retired the old blotchy stamps and just used the new ones for DC. Marvels are all done with the old stamps but there a number which have both the old & new stamps (e.g. ASM 26, Avengers 16 & 18, DD 7 and most of the FF's). The fact that some of the numbers on the old stamps are higher than the numbers on the new stamps tells you that both sets of stamps were in use at the same time. The only exception to this is FF 39 which seems to have only the new stamp and the stamp numbers seem way out of sequence, so I think FF 39 may be the only one that rocked up late, but it really looks like it did. Now I just need Albert 'Adrian Mole' Tatlock to post his diary entry "Just my luck. Went looking for FF39 yet again...."

Many thanks, Albert. Might you have a note in your records from your purchases at the time that says it was a late purchase or might it just be missing from the list of purchases at the time indicating it was not bought for some reason?

Rare Australian variant.

@Albert Tatlock Hi Albert, could you please check your grimoire of 60's purchases for me? I'm curious about FF #39. All the Marvels with June 65 cover dates have '4' stamps at T&P and they're all the old big blotchy stamps. It's probably the most uniform month there is. I've never even found one johnny come lately or rando makeweight. The exception to this is FF #39 which has '8' stamps (and I think a couple of '6's) and they are ALL the new small neater stamps. These stamps replaced the old big blotchy ones, but not at a stroke (hard to tell when - you get DC's with both kinds of stamp. Action Comics 325 for example - cd June - has '1' stamps in the new style, but '5' stamps in both the new & old styles, which, if you didn't know DC was chaos would lead you to conclude that they resumed using the old stamps 4 months after they switched to the new ones or that it was a 4 month cutover, neither of which is true, I think). The upshot is every June 65 cd Marvel has old blotchy 4 stamps except FF 39 which has all new neat 6 and 8 stamps, and no old blotchy 4's, which leads me to think that FF 39 missed the boat and came later. Do you have any notes which indicates anything about this issue? Note: Duncan McAlpine says "The Variant UK copies have a 10d ink cover stamp. It's usually a larger size stamp but some #39's have a smaller size stamp." This would be what you'd think based on just looking at Marvels at the time, but doesn't seem to be true of FF 39 (at least in 2.5 years of looking, I've never found a large stamp and about 2 dozen small ones).

Classics Illustrated (originating from Bible Stories illustrated) were the mainstay of T&P's output in the 50's and Gilberton's owned T&P in the 60's, so CI are of huge interest to this discussion and may actually reveal some things that Marvel, DC etc don't. Thanks for posting these. This is an interesting bundle in that it mixes US and UK editions. The UK editions are not merely re-priced US editions (like PV's) they are complete reprints because in the 1950's it was illegal to import these publications. You'd therefore expect to see one or the other, but you do sometimes see a mix of cents and pence copies which must indicate that they were collected like we collected Marvel & DC etc.

And a cousin

A big old 4d from the cunningly named 'Bookshop' bookshop in Geordieland. Note how the original 9d is wonky (they're all like that).

Another one bites the dust. Only need a stampy stampy of #58 now. I suppose, given that the UK price is supposed to replace the US price, it's weird that you don't see this placement more often.

Not relevant but incidentally, re the T&P fire, where Steve Chibnall says 'fire destroyed the Oadby headquarters and the company moved to a new complex in Thurmaston' this is misleading. The Thurmaston warehouse was opened, as a warehouse, in 1965 but T&P were advertising for non-warehouse, main office staff as early as 1965, while still at East Street in Oadby, who would actually work in the Thurmaston location once hired. A long transition was clearly planned. The Town Council and local planning still refer to the building very much as the T&P warehouse even after T&P had seemingly relocated to Thurmaston in 1966. People who remember the fire universally seem to conflate it with a fire at Invicta Plastics in 1970. In 1971, the owners of the site were 'anxious to redevelop the site which had been destroyed by fire'. This doesn't make it sound like it had sat there burned out for 5 years. I suspect the fire happened after T&P had left and the building was empty. I've never been able to understand how they packed so many functions, departments and people into so small a space, so it makes a lot of sense that they moved out over the course of a year or more. They moved into East Street in 1948, so they potentially had the lease until 1968 and were operating out of both premises, but the registered office became Thurmaston, hence the indicias changed. This might well have contributed to the bankruptcy as they were paying 2 leases in this period, but this always happens when you relocate a business. So, I don't think it's correct to say 'fire destroyed Oadby and they moved to Thurmaston'. They had demonstrably long been at Thurmaston before the fire happened, and though it might have been a factor in moving the last functions to Thurmaston, I don't think the fire had anything causal to do with the move. Of course, it may still have been the old joke: "I'm so sorry to hear about your fire last Tuesday" "Shhhhh! It's NEXT Tuesday"

In the late 40's, a US publisher called Richard Kravitz bought up returns of newspapers (including the funnies, so possibly including comics) and advertised them for sale by the ton as wrapping paper in, believe it or not, India. These were the initial lots of newspapers that Fred Thorpe bought up and sold the colour supplements as US magazines to a glossy-US-mag starved post-war UK populace. UK publishers would have been unable to import US comics or sell them as such, but there would have been nothing to stop them buying waste paper, or indeed anything importable as news media, printing new covers (thereby getting rid of the US prices, indicias and all reference to their source) and putting on a new UK cover with a UK price on it, thereby making it ostensibly a British publication. Certainly cheaper than paying to import the matrices and reprinting them, but you'd need a lot of each individual title (you could, of course, print up reasonably generic covers and then put varying innards into them.....i.e. exactly what they did later with the double doubles).

I assume this Jerry Levine worked for Capital Distribution, which was the in-house distributor of Charlton based in Derby, Connecticut. Does this mean that Goldstar became the UK distributor of Charlton?

Blimey. Thanks Albert. More info there than the whole of Brothers Dave's magnum opus.

Speaking of David Gold corrections, I should pull myself up on this one. This could also have been United Anglo American on the Holloway Road. They advertised their reprints of US comics as 'American comics'.

Well, given that you pasted a PDF of the whole book, I think your conscience is clear.

Good catch on Portman. I completely forgot about them. Strange that Gold took on another imprint for these when they were already distributing Conan and DHOKF through Gold Star, but then they presumably bought the company for it's portfolio. It's weird that Transworld stamped their little feet about these but let others which were more central to the MU be reprinted (....but then I'm probably getting confused. Conan was actually reprints but DHOKF were imports).

Fully agree it's a fun read and clearly not really ghost written. It has the rambling '...and another thing....' feel of someone you got chatting to in a pub, which I think is deliberate. That said, I think the bits that Albert & I quoted back on page 182/3 are literally the sum total of the comic related info. @Get Marwood & I @Albert Tatlock Would you agree, gents, that he just kind of blasts past all the stuff we'd be interested in? One minute he's buying up the lease on 4 shops in London and the next minute he's a running an airline, a football team and Anne Summers.

He also part-owned Moore Harness, a niche high street distributor which was set up in the 60's to distribute alternative, counter-culture publications like Private Eye & Oz (later Viz and Time Out). They became the UK distributor for DC after Windham shut T&P down.