Malacoda

Very possible. Uganda had a very affluent Indian population until Amin expelled them. It may have just been somewhere else that still used shillings, but they would have to have used the symbol as well i.e. 2/-. Edit: whoops, sorry, you went on to make exactly that point. I was going line by line.

Wow. This little lot is going to need some chewing over. But first off.......FIVE shillings??????

Lovely to have you back. I'm loving the conjecture. So the reason these span over 10 years of comics is because they were all piled up in Thurmaston and actually stamped as a job lot in the 70's? Uganda was indeed still using the shilling, but it was neither the UK shilling nor the East African shilling. In the mid 70's, 2/- Ugandan was about 80p UK money which would have made comics utterly unaffordable even with UK pocket money. I can't believe a typical Ugandan child would have seen 2/- in a year, let alone have spent it on a comic. So, I don't buy it, but I like the fact that it explains why they are all priced at 2/-. Because they were all priced at the same time and bound for somewhere where a shilling was not a UK shilling. The theory also requires, as you say, some of them to be unstamped. This would mean they were bought and shipped all the way here but never distributed. Seems odd that T&P were gathering up all the unsolds from all over the country, re-distributing at discounts, re-distributing to seaside towns, creating the Double Doubles and the annuals out of the leftovers, but at the same time had tons of comics that they just never bothered to / failed to distribute. It also seems odd that you get comics like Avengers 25 which was actually a PV. T&P never had any unstamped cents copies. This one could have been a makeweight rando thrown into a crate, I guess, but we're building land bridges here. Also, as has been demonstrated by Marwood and the Robot (which sounds like 70's crime fighting duo), there is a mad variety of stuff with this stamp over a long period of time. If someone were carefully selecting a package of export materials from the measureless-to-man leftovers at Thurmaston, it was with some wild selection criteria.

Indeed, though it raises the question of whether it was a re-saler, a wholesaler or a retailer. The amount of these is so small and so spread out over time, it could be a retailer. To this day, I still see stickers from pretty much every shop I bought from 40 years ago (including DTW, LTS, FP, Comics Showcase and just the other day a stack of Defenders from Books Bits & Bobs in Kingston). (Upon Thames).

@Albert Tatlock To your point about the purpose of the diamond stamp, this is a 2/- comic that was actually stamped 2/- at the time, so stamping it with 2/- again was completely redundant unless the stamp was serving some other purpose. Also (1) the fact that it was stamped 2/- by T&P means it was stamped at the time (2) the fact that it's Marvel means it was almost certainly shipped at the point of production not some unspecified time later and (3) the T&P stamp looks distinctly faded to me which means either Ethel needed to hit the pad again or, equally possibly, it had already spent some time out in the world. So maybe a return that was sold on and had to be re-stamped because the T&P price wasn't the official stamp of whoever was re-retailing it.

Cool. T&P AND popular book centre AND the mystery diamond stamp on a comic from December 1970. I think the ampersands and (excuse me, &) post-decimal pricing combo starts in June and is the only game in town after October. Though, obviously, it's DC returns so it's either that or absolutely anything else.

Right a bit, left a bit, fire!!

I can't answer this question, Eric, but it's a great question. Actually, if I want to be a real smart-arse, I can answer the first one. I reckon it would be the Classic Comics Ivanhoe in December 1941. But that's not what you mean by UK produced material, is it?

Wow. Good shout. The Avengers is from 1968 So Danger Man would long predate it. Note, Danger Man being the original series and Secret Agent being the US title of the resurrected series, both Dell's DM and Gold Key's SA predate the Avengers by 7 and 2 years respectively, though nothing suggests they had access to any UK originals. Hopefully, one of our pals operating at a level of completism that probably warrants medication, can retrieve the relevant issues from their meticulously curated collections.

From William Jones book on Classics Illustrated: "In 1940, Elliott Publishing Company began re-packaging pairs of remaindered comic books in a 128 page format called Double Comics. Pairs of coverless comics from different publishers were bound together with new covers and sold for the price of one." Now there's an idea.

This is not strictly relevant (you'll be surprised to hear), but I was looking at some Alan Class comics. As we know, Class was in one by himself when it came to publishing and we know for a fact that he scooped up all the unsold copies very meticulously to re-sell them to seaside and holiday locations. He had deals with every US publisher you can think of, including Harvey, Timely/Atlas/Marvel, DC, ACG, Charlton, Archie, Fawcett, King and some you probably can't like Gleason & Sterling. We also know that he bought up all of Miller's plates when they wound up and continued publishing those for years. He was famous for re-using these plates for years, but with access to so much material, I assumed that he didn't need to keep reprinting the same stories over & over again, as much as legend has it. Wow, was I wrong. I just looked through all the covers of Secrets of the Unknown. Out of 252 issues, there is almost nothing that is used only once. I am assuming that the re-use of the covers is indicative of the re-use of the interior material. Some of these stories are reprinted anything up to 4 times in the same series. This is SOTU 68, 137, 167 and 205. This appears to be a cover-to-cover reprint x 4 of Strange Suspense Stories #75 from Charlton from 1965. There are many others that are reprinted multiple times. I particularly like number 14 which comes back as number 145. You would imagine, if it weren't for the changed price, that that was a misprint with an extra digit. But no. SOTU had 252 issues over 26 years so it must have been monthly (at least) for most of that time. If he was printing these titles right through the year, then collecting them back up to redistribute the following summer, and some of these were being reprinted every 6 or 7 months, it follows that when he printed a comic in October and then reprinted it in April, by the time he was sending the returns off to Scarborough, Skegness and St Ives the following August, he may have been sending two or more differently numbered but identical comics in the same batches, possibly with different cover prices. Having said that, he was probably sending God knows how many overlapping versions of God knows what. It was Alan Class, after all. Gotta love him.

You were saying 60's and early 70's above, but Titan would put us in the 80's?

This explains why T&P were in there. Their storage seems to be a mix of large outer-city warehouses and depots with smaller units, lock ups, garages, rooms above shops etc in the inner cities where all the newsagents were. A spacious, cheap rent, dry, easy access, inner-city storage area would have ticked every box for them.

? You mean there were basement shops with steps leading down from the street? It would be interesting to know if this coincided with the T&P rep being based there. Given that his job was to seek and supply retail outlets for comics, he would certainly have supplied an actual comic that was in the same building.

So you didn't have any Doc Strange or Silver Surfer T shirts?

Hold the phone. So you rented a room in this stately pile? Given the size of it, it's next to impossible it was the same room formerly used by the T&P rep, but you were in the same building. Dude!

Indeed. He was the last person ever prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Perhaps more impressively, he was also the first person to have been prosecuted under it for 25 years. I imagine barristers were queuing up to get that one.

I know you're trying to make me ask if he got his fingers caught in the till, but I shan't. Looks like Paramount is still there (as of May 23) but the comic racks are long gone. I have to question the business-sense of placing comics outside a shop in Manchester. Cottonopolis was literally built on wetness.

Wait a second. That sign to the left says 'rubber stamps'. Are you fiendishly using auto suggestion to seduce us into your diamond stamp conspiracy?

......T&P did have a RSM based at the Corn Exchange Buildings on Fennel St. Knowing my Manchester geography as I do (i.e. not even a little bit), I have read Odyssey 7 described as "up the road from Victoria Station and a short walk from the Corn Exchange" which puts it tantalisingly near both the T&P warehouse and your described establishment.....however, I get the impression that you're talking more about a dusty second hand bookshop with a box of comics under the counter than a dedicated comic shop with a sea of short boxes proudly stretching from wall to wall.

I doubt it. T&P had a massive presence in Liverpool / Runcorn / Widnes / the Wirral so the presence in Manchester was less than you'd imagine for so big a city. However.....[see next post]

Do they all have the same number?

I love this idea. I can't in all honesty imagine that it's the answer. But I want it to be.