Gold Key Circulation Inserts - Stapled? 1 1

[nycjadie]

Anyone seen these?  They appear as hand-typed inserts which are stapled into the inside front cover.  Grade is relatively mid to high, minus the staple to the cover.  I have at least 2 books that have this info.  I've never encountered this, and my Google-fu is coming up empty.  Perhaps they are file copies?  I have several hundred more books to go through.  Might have more.  

 

 

[AJD]

Interesting inserts, especially seeing the Australia numbers in there. I think you're almost certainly right about them being file copies.

[AJD]

Following up on my own post (yeah, I'll go blind) - the curious thing is that Australia wasn't using $ and c in 1962 or 1965. Any books exported into our market would need a price change, either at the press (as was done for UK editions of Marvels) or at our end. I haven't seen any Gold Keys with an overprint, so I wonder how it was done? 19,400 comics is a lot for price changes after printing!

@Duffman_Comics - this might explain the 1960-ish Dell Donald Duck with the 9d overprint we noted on eBay a while back?

[Duffman_Comics]

5 hours ago, AJD said:

Following up on my own post (yeah, I'll go blind) - the curious thing is that Australia wasn't using $ and c in 1962 or 1965. Any books exported into our market would need a price change, either at the press (as was done for UK editions of Marvels) or at our end. I haven't seen any Gold Keys with an overprint, so I wonder how it was done? 19,400 comics is a lot for price changes after printing!

@Duffman_Comics - this might explain the 1960-ish Dell Donald Duck with the 9d overprint we noted on eBay a while back?

The thing is, whilst Australia didn't get decimal currency until Feb 1966, there were a lot of comics sold here that were simply "fully imported" US books, with the price adjustment done by the newsagent at the point of sale - usually a handwritten price of 9d/10d/ 1/- with the US price "struck through".

I bought books like this at the time - I especially recall a Mighty Crusaders #4, April 1966 cover date that I expected to pay 10 cents for (the equivalent of 1 shilling post decimal currency) but the newsagent charged me 12c - the equivalent of 1/2d.

I think he was taking advantage of the changeover/confusion to screw over his customers.

I have never seen a Western (Gold Key) price variant for either the UK or Oz and I do not think Western bothered with them.

Why Dell did so is a mystery.

What is also interesting are the data for Australia and the UK for the same issue. In 1965 the UK's population was 54.35 million, Australia was 11.44 million. (Source Wikipedia. Don't judge me).

So the UK has almost five times the population, yet gets just under a quarter of the issues sent to Australia. That's remarkable and either indicative of the strength of the local market in the UK or (my suspicion) the weakness of the locally produced Australian stuff.

Further observations. Marvel's were well supported in the local market and at one point (and only for one or two issues) had white 10c stickers carefully placed over the US 12c price. Now, I have seen too many of these to believe that it wasn't the distributor's action  - perhaps some feedback from angry 10  year old comic buyers who had had another extorted?

Oh, and the stickers are a right mongrel to remove without damaging the comic .

Edited March 14, 2018 by Duffman_Comics
Further thoughts

[nycjadie]

So, I have a bit more info from John at Comichron, suggesting these are very rare indeed:

I am almost posiive these are copies sent to Walter Lantz's studio from Western Publishing, and either Western or Lantz's people affixed the sales data to them. Western would have been paying Lantz for the license, and basing what they paid on the numbers.