Mr Thorpe

Your 'receipt' for your bag was half of a playing card. The other half was clothespegged on to your bag. I never bought much in there and Mr Grumpy was none too pleased if you'd wasted his time without buying anything and just wanted your bag back! I seem to recall FP ran a 'bag exchange programme' as well, when they first opened.

In my callow youth, in the late 1970's and 1980's, I was a regular visitor to Leicester Sq and its environs, doing the 'comic rounds'. I also remember that shop in Denmark Place. Wasn't it called 'LTS'? I don't think I ever knew what LTS actually stood for. There were two people running the shop. The older guy, who was behind the scenes and a younger bloke who seemed to be permanently grumpy.

Re the apparent misnumbering of Action #347 and #348 in terms of their cover months. 347 is actually Mar-Apr 1967 and was on sale Jan 10th 1967 so did pre-date 348 which had an on sale date of Jan 31st 1967. Wherever DC put the cover month in a black outline, it was 'bi-monthly', with the latter month in the black box, so April in this case. Check out their regular bi-monthly titles -Metal Men, Teen Titans etc. They also did it with 80 page giants which were presumably meant to sit on the newstands for 2 months to maximise sales. Quirky T&P UK distribution fact on bi-m

I thought I'd throw my hypothesis to the wall and see if it sticks! T&P decide they need to raise the prices of all their American comics from 9d to 10d sometime in 1964. No problem on the DC's as they are stamped here. Prices go up from 9d to 10d from Oct 1964 cover dates. T&P make their request to Marvel to change the UKPV price from 9d to 10d (in June/July 1964?). Easier said than done say Marvel and there is a lot of faffing about between T&P, Marvel and the printers at Sparta which takes 9 months. As an interim Marvel offer T&P their 'unsolds' to supply

This one's for Albert too. Parity at last. A 2/- Diamond stamp and a regular 10p T&P stamp!

Is this the evidence we were looking for? A contemporaneous use of the 2/- diamond stamp to (almost) prove categorically it's a T&P stamp! I'm not a denizen, I just visit occasionally!

I do have a fair few L Miller stamps on my IW's/Supers. I also found these two 9d stamp examples, which I think you have already. They were the only copies. Most of my IW's/Supers seemed to not have a UK stamp at all.

They are the only 3 in my (IW/Super) collection. I would have bought them in London, probably at a mart and probably all three together. Pure speculation but possibly comics that can't be returned? I'm sure if it was the equivalent of a '10', we would have seen more of them. It's almost like a rare limited edition T&P stamp. Another one for the back burner.

Where do these 'X's' fit in?!! I was looking through my collection of IW's/Supers for an elusive first cycle '7' and instead found these. The third one you can just about make out it's an 'X'. They certainly look like T&P stamps although the font is slightly different.

Those 6's look like first cycles to me. I suspect there was a rush to get stuff over, anything, so this was what was in the warehouse in the States at the time and easily available. I don't think they were market testers. As Albert says, it's the wrong titles to use as a market test. Having said that, just to complicate matters, remember you still had the Australian Batman and Superman comics on the stands at the time. I think we need to add in the ACG's to get more data! I like ACG's!

Another one to 'tick off'!

A few more early ones

Albert, that looks like a diamond version of a T&P stamp. It's even got a number. I'd love to have one of those! I'm beginning to suspect that these mysterious diamond stamps in shillings are actually old T&P stamps. They've also got numbers!

T&P surely wouldn't sort returned unsolds into title and issue no? What would be the point? Also the T&P stamped unsold returns would be pretty ragged, having been on spinner racks for at least a month. Another theory (no thieving involved this time!) -it's possible T&P had too many of a particular issue, they stamped up most of them. Most of the stamped ones went to the shops. The rest of the stamped ones and the remaining unstamped stayed in the warehouse until disposal. This is a 'Cold Case' demanding resolution!

It's possible, I suppose, if it was theft, that the thief took both boxes of unstamped and stamped copies, not having the luxury to select just unstamped ones. The fact that there are T&P stamped copies supports the theft from the T&P warehouse theory. The jumbling up could have happened later. Most 'shrinkage' is an inside job. So it's possible boxes were half inched on several occasions over a period of time, hence a limited selection of particular titles and numbers over a about a year. But why use old currency stamps? That's the biggest mystery!