Malacoda

@Garystar @Get Marwood & I @Kevin.J Gents, apologies for the tardy thanks. Been away for a few days. But thank you all for the 69/71 cover stamp issues. Really can't thank you enough.

We also tend to forget about John Menzies but they were absolutely massive, not only as a high street newsagents/stationers, but also importers/exporters, to the point that they started their own freight airline, which is the only bit of it left these days. I think the date you site is the most telling thing. Whereas comics in the US were only just coming out of the post-Wertham trough in 60/61, the UK import ban had recently lifted and the likes of Fred Thorpe were standing by the UK docks with the engine running, so I'd imagine an absolute ton of leftovers and returns got unearthed and sent over at very short notice in that period.

Hi Gary, Great to see you When you previously sent me your work on this, I took it as Gospel and went from there (i.e. I didn't repeat any of your work). Over the year+ of searching. I've obviously stumbled onto most of the ones you sent me, but there are a few of yours I've never found. If you have any scans, these would be lovely as they'd complete my record. The ten that you have that I still don't are: Thor 167, Hulk 125, Avengers 84, X men 63, DD 57, Iron Man 16, 17 & 18, 23, 25. At the start, I was finding scans of your ones all the time, but obviously as my focus has tightened, I'm not stumbling across these ones any more (and I was always focussing on the ones that neither of us had). If you (or anyone) has scans of stamped copies of these, it would great to have a full record of all the covers.

I'm useless at grading. The fact that you can still have tanning, corner blunting, spine roll, creases up to a quarter of an inch with colour break & discoloured staples with tearing on a 7.0 FN/VF is bonkers to me. The system should take account of an accumulation of defects (I know good graders do, but it's not inherent in Overstreet's grading tables).

Did you get any sense of a pattern? E.g. if the shipping was every 28 days rather than every month, you'd get a constant regression i.e. the stamping dates would fall progressively earlier through each month until the cycle went round again. Then we'd have to match a 13 month year to a 9 stamp cycle. I'm not sure anyone would be turned on at the thought of having to plot that out. I stand corrected. (you probably went into this in great detail at the time which I've failed to retain,,,,apologies if so).

Up to a point. And then everything changes.

I agree, I now think all the super hero ones will. From the perspective of my personal bent (leave it), the Tower of Shadows / Chamber of Darkness type titles are actually more interesting at this point because you can see T&P flexing their import order for the first time. It's the first time you ever get non D titles.

Stickers are always interesting. This one seems to be replacing the shilling price, which is odd as this is April 1970 when pretty much everything was double priced and certainly no one was confused about what a shilling was. If it was going round for a second time when 5p had largely supplanted the shilling it would make sense, but then it would have to have spent a year under Ethel's desk. But you're absolutely right, this is definitely a shilling PV with a 5p sticker over the shilling not a cents copy. I can tell by taking off my Clark Kent glasses and looking straight through the sticker. The rest of you will just have to notice that the Curtis logo is missing.

I've seen this stamp a few times. What's interesting is that Marvels never cost 6p in the T&P era. I've catalogued it as stamping mystery number 2,378,892 and I have top men looking into it. Top. Men.

I may have a go, but I think I'd have to sample all/most/many of the titles over maybe 4 or 5 years on ebay and other sources. That said, if a comic did consistently show substantially more surviving stamps than PV's over that period, I think you'd have to conclude that there were more stamps in the first place. Obviously, it's possible that there were 10,000 PV's that all got binned and 2,000 stamps that all survived, but you'd really have to want to believe that to raise it as an objection. The good thing about the late 60's is that there were a lot of collectors by this point, so there is hard core of comics being retained from first purchase.

Indeed, but I think that fact indicates that the volumes varied . The thing I need to track at some point is the amount of PV's that crop up vs the amount of stamps. If I'm right, the stamps should have a lot more variability (be very interesting if they actually outnumbered the PV's on some titles or in some months). There's a few other projects ahead of that on the priority list though. Thanks again for these.

Is it my birthday and nobody told me?

That sticker really does look like 6p doesn't it? Surely it must be 5p though? Unless it was stickered MUCH later. It does look like there's a T&P stamp underneath it, doesn't it? They weren't 6p for another 2-3 years. Mind you, we know that comics hung around at T&P for 6 years and more.

Dude! That finishes off the FF i.e. we now know that there was a stamp variant for every PV. This is only the second title completed. Your No Prize in in the mail.

Mmmm. Indeed. You mean #13, but yes, I see the oh-so-familiar splotch. That might actually be the most disputed comic of all time (Paul Gravett had it as ND, Alan Austin thought it was distributed and Duncan thinks it's a stamp. I think you're on the fence, but definitely not a PV and I think it was ND). By this point, a sticker could easily be a comic shop sticker. Dark They Were always put stickers over the US prices. The list of comics for which I'd love to find a stamped example is now: Hulk 116, 137, 138. FF 102 ASM 76, 79, 94, 95. Avengers 65, 70, 72 X men 56, 58, 60, 62, 64 DD 54, 58, 59, 62, 69 IM 15, 21, 22 Captain Marvel 13, 21 Subby 17, 20, 23 Surfer 15, 16, 17 Chamber of Darkness 6,7,8 Monsters on the Prowl 9 Where Monsters Dwell 3,4,5,6,7 Amazing Adventures 3 Astonishing Tales 2,3,4 all between April 1969 and August 1971 cover dates. Those X men still make think that these were used to make up total consignment volumes.

Enjoy your break. If you're away for a couple of weeks, I may have a stamp numbering theory for you to catch up on, but I imagine by the time you see it, everyone will have already have agreed it's the only possible answer and there will be nothing left for you to do but agree with us all.

All?

True dat. The entry for T&P gives their address as "Melton Road, Thurmaston, Oadby, Leicester" which is a mash up of two different addresses 10 miles apart. It says " At first, the company was known for repackaging American comics and pulp magazines for the UK market. Later on, it became a publisher of original material" but actually, T&P's first original novel was the fabulously titled "Susie Goes to Soho" in June 1947. Fred didn't start repackaging American magazines for a full year after this. It also says that Gilberton 'acquired Thorpe & Porter from Fred Thorpe in the fall of 1959'. It seems like Gilberton became investors at some point, possibly 1962 when Bill Kanter joined T&P to supervise the new Classics Illustrated, but not so sure about 1959. According to the Wikipedia entry, this little tidbit comes from page 315 of "Jones, William B., Jr., Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, with Illustrations (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002). Second edition, 2011". Well, page 315 of the second edition is part of the index for a start and secondly, even the chapter that is about T&P doesn't say Gilberton's bought them, so that must have come from somewhere else. So, yes, fully agree....wikipedia is a great start place, but you'd want corroboration before you took anything to the bank.

Have you just ploughed through the whole thing? Hats off, if so. I imagine that would take some stamina by this point.

9d, 10d, 1/- ......you can't put a price on Victory. Apparently. (10d is the headline price, 9d would be a discounted price, I imagine and 1/- was the price in Ireland).

Hmmm. Whilst going through a box of what I can only describe as 'old toot' I discovered this Charlton Atomic Mouse from Jan 1961

I think it had to be. If they had announced it with any notice period up then anyone contemplating any purchase of an import would have run out and bought it. Every business that used imports in any way would bought anything it could in advance and crashed sterling even further. Callaghan & Wilson had both been vehemently against devaluing sterling, but Callaghan had staked his reputation on it to the point that he had to resign as Chancellor. This was really a huge deal as the UK and every other major country had been part of the Bretton Woods financial accord since the war. Bretton Woods required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates and then the dollar was convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at $35 per ounce, so it tied every country (except Russia) effectively to a global gold standard. Changing where you sat against the dollar changed where you sat against every currency in the world and against the global gold standard. As you say, everyone knew it was coming, but when and by how much was a secret. Even then, speculators were killing the currency reserves.

OK, this is my tight five. 1st Marvel PV hiatus: Duration: October 1964 to August 1965 Started because: prior to the 1964 election, the new govt was proposing a new import tax, but as no one knew when the tax would begin or the percentage, and PV’s had to be ordered 3 months in advance, the only way to get ahead of the tax was to flip to stamping in advance (hence the first stamps are still 9d). Ended because: the tax was supposed to be a temporary measure but actually lasted 2 years, so after 7 months of waiting, T&P flipped back to 10d PV’s, which then took 3 months to catch up to cover date. 2nd Marvel PV hiatus: Duration: October to December 1966. Started because: in the first 6 months of 1966, T&P was headed for bankruptcy and bills were not getting paid. Marvel reduced supply accordingly, restricting the number of titles (and possibly the volumes of the ones that still got PV’s, though I suspect not). Ended because: IND bought T&P and normal business relations were resumed. 3rd Marvel PV hiatus: Duration: November 1967 to March 1969. Started because: UK devalued currency. Again, it was not known by how much or when this would be, so T&P went to stamps in advance. During this period, I think T&P enjoyed the flexibility of extra volume (which is why the stamps carry on in tandem with the PV’s afterwards) and during this period they were flipping printers from ECP to WCP, so each cover date month was made up of up to 8 print runs from 2 different suppliers. This also coincides with the Marvel explosion of new titles and breaking out of ST/TOS/TTA into 6 separate titles. Bafflingly, they did not automatically put the new titles with the new printer, so they not only had to be launched but then separately migrated to WCP. It was clearly decided not to add flipping back to PV’s to the chaos. Once all titles were under WCP (after cd Jan 1969), they re-started PV’s which kicked in from cd April 1969. You can see that this issue related to the printers, because, unlike the 2 previous hiatuses, when PV’s resume, it happens all in the same cover date month: everything that was going to get a PV gets one at the same time, but not based on release date, based on cover date, clearly co-ordinated by the printer.

I have tried that group and while it has some interesting photos of the area, they are quite religiously pre-1960. There are some photos of London Road where Fred's original newsagents was, but I haven't seen one of the actual newsagents. I am in touch with some other people on FB (who have memories of the area and more specifically of T&P) and I did think for a moment there I'd found one of the Ethels, but nothing helpful so far. Mostly it's people whose parents or grandparents worked there briefly and remember getting free comics that were subsequently binned. Best not to think about that. I will keep chatting to these people and report anything useful that turns up.

I think the old T&P premises at Thurmaston actually became the Walkers premises. It's hard to work out exactly, but T&P moved out in 1971 and Walkers sold the brand to Standard Brands in 1971 who I believe relocated the crisps & snacks there while Walker's went back to their original core business....pies! The Walker's factory has morphed into a monster since then, so it's hard to work out.