GA question from an SA guy, Super Magician v3#1

[Tempus Fugit]

Greetings,

 

I picked up this book in a lot yesterday. It is in really nice shape.

 

It is a single staple ww2 book, with lots of propaganda.

 

Here is my question:

 

One of the pages is a single page that is kind of jammed into the book like they forgot it, ill fitting and only on the first half of the book. It is necessary to maintain story continuity, and the story on what would be the "opposite" page in the back half of the book retains continuity.

 

It looks to me like they messed up and ended up with an odd number of pages and added this single page loose to fix it. You can see it hanging out in the pic. The book is otherwise very sound and well put together.

 

Expert opinions?

 

 

[Bookery]

During the War, a number of publishers briefly switched to 60-page issues (counting covers) down from the standard 68, in order to meet paper conservation guidelines. This is also why the book is single-staple (steel conservation).

 

If you look through the book, you'll actually find several other "single pages" with only a slight extra amount of paper added to act as a tab to hold onto the staple. It is common for these to easily pull loose from the staple. There are slight variances in how each publisher cut their pages to get the count down to 60.

 

BTW -- Howard Keltner's 1997 index is excellent for identifying golden-age page counts, HOWEVER, he is wrong on his Super Magician listings. He shows only four consecutive 60-page issues for this title, where there are in fact 9 such issues... including the one you show above.

 

[Tempus Fugit]

thanks for the info, that's what I suspected, it looks like this page was not under the staple when it was bound

[telerites]

Here's the link for Keltner Index that Bookery mentioned from Twomorrows Publishing in case anyone needs it.

 

 

www.twomorrows.com/alterego/media/Golden%20Age%20Index.pdf

[Comicdey]

The Grand comics database also gives out page counts I believe.

 

What you describe is normal and usual on street and smith books if that era as previously described.