Comics, Pulps, and Paperbacks: Why such a discrepancy in values? 25 25

[Cat-Man_America]

Hi,

 

Careful about the sales of 6th street books, as that is mainly with Spicy's. The other thing to watch is the fact that the one Spicy that sold for $5600 was re-listed by six street books and just sold for around $800.

 

Spicy's have always been great sellers, but believe it or not, their market has been higher and hotter in the past decade, and other than in this single owner collection which has gathered hype, the Spicy sales are not where they once were.

 

The reason that these Spicy's have sold so well is that it was a single owner collection and nearly a complete Spicy collection. One guy re-listed a couple of sixth street books on his own after purchasing some, and realized only half the value that he originally paid. Nevertheless, the collection is great, and the books are very nice, and the dealer selling them is very forthright and honest.

 

I have been following pulps the pulp market very carefully, and have been buying and selling high end pulps and collections over carefully over the past 15 years. Right now the market is in a slump, and other than the Ultra rare issues, high grade early hero titles (first or second year if the title), Spicys, and some Weird tales, pulp prices are much lower than they were six to ten years ago. I have an ultra high grade Shadow run, and I can tell you that the prices on hero pulps are down at least 50% from what they were from 2000-2008.

 

 

The pulps certainly have room to grow, but a number of factors inhibit this.

 

1). Availability, especially in grade

 

2). An aging collector base that grew up on the pulps and the pulp Hero's.

 

3). In order to create a frenzy, there has to be a fervour created, and to do that you need continuous sales, especially of the rare issues and high grade issues and there just is not enough supply to create this.

 

4) no slabbing (thank goodness) to create the investor market. You could slab the 1940's pulps, but not the 20's and 30's pulps with the large overhangs, without damaging the overhangs themselves.

 

5). The heavy hitters in the market, especially the silver age, have not grown up on the pulps, and maybe other than the Shadow, this generation and especially the previous generation have no affiation with the characters or pulps themselves.

 

6). Pulp collectors tend to collect for authors, and stories etc., and in general are not as demanding for the grade, therefore less competition.

 

7). A number of comic dealers jumped on board and then quickly got off the pulp bandwagon around 2000-2005, and a number of the heavy hitters that once collected the pulps (especially hero) are no longer collecting. I bought out 7 hard core Shadow collectors that would pay high prices, and now there are less collectors, and less demand.

 

8). Only a handful of all pulp collectors will spend some serious cash. Frank Robinson's lifetime collection of high grade pulps sold primarily to two people, with one person buying nearly 75% of the entire collection.

 

9). There have not been a string if successful movies created from pulp characters, just a couple of flops.

 

Dwight

 

 

 

Excellent post, Dwight.

 

I would only differ on a couple of minor points. I think slabbing of pulps with overhangs is possible, but it may require a redesigned inner well. Also, oversized pulps without overhangs, such as early Amazing Stories wouldn't be a problem if the slab itself were large enough to hold it.

 

Pulp readers/collectors (like comic collectors) can obtain most if not all the stories, including interior art through other formats (digital copies, reprint collections, etc.), but something needs to be done to conserve the fragile pulp paper and stabilize values while encouraging interest in the pulp market.

 

While readers collect pulps for specific authors and stories, the magnificent cover art has always been the doorway to pulp appreciation. This plays right into the idea that grading and slabbing of high grade examples of these books is the ultimate key to establishing a sustainable high end market for pulps.

 

Thinking outside the box, in order to grow the collector base a flexible grading and encapsulation system has to be employed that takes into account best surviving examples. Due to differences in design, size and PQ, high grade for a pulp isn't necessarily the same as high grade for a comic book of equivalent age and wear.

 

Of course, this is all just speculation on my part and I'm sure that there would be resistance by some in the pulp collecting community to any type of encapsulation system.

[Pat Calhoun]

I don’t claim this list as comprehensive, so if you fave’s absent no slam intended. These are authors I like. All mystery writers, because (until Ace started rolling in 1953) vintage SF PBs few and far between. Hard to believe I started collecting PBs 54 years ago, but began both comics and Ace SF Double-Novels in early 1960.

 

Erle Stanley Gardner / A. A. Fair – Plentiful & cheap & good reads: Perry Mason from Pocket Books & Donald Lam & Bertha Cool (AA Fair) from Dell. The D.A. series (Pocket) also good. Reprinted often enough there can be several vintage versions of a given title.

 

Fredric Brown – SF & Mystery writer, ‘The Dead Ringer’ (Bantam) is a must: carny atmosphere and eerie murders.

 

John D. MacDonald – Went on to fame and fortune, but for me the hard edge of his mid-‘50s stuff (‘April Evil’ –Dell, a prime example) very sharp indeed.

 

Day Keene – A fave. When Fawcett scored big in 1950 with the Gold Medal line of PBO’s (paperback originals as opposed to traditional reprints- the real reason they abandoned comics) Keene supplied a string of taut thrillers that helped define the era. What GM didn’t take Ace did, some great ones there too.

 

Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe – The classic armchair detective. Wrote enough to supply Dell & Bantam.

 

Jim Thompson – Another key 1950s voice, and a triumphant score for Lion (M Goodman, Atlas etc). ‘A Hell of a Woman’ is a tour-de-force: an incredible fusion of hi & low lit- the ending is almost Faulknerian (street style all the way) in its climax of violent death.

 

Jonathan Latimer – Doesn’t get enough attention. The Detective Crane series (Pocket) is good fun & later novels ‘The Fifth Grave’ (Pop Lib) & ‘Sinners and Shrouds’ (Pocket) both stupendous.

 

Cornell Woolrich - Great novels and short stories. ‘The Bride Wore Black’ is not only a suspense thriller of the highest order, it’s also an existential masterpiece. (PS- Francois fluffed it.)

 

Raymond Chandler / Dashiell Hammett – Chandler’s 1940s Philip Marlowe novels feature the quintessential ‘first person PI voice’. And Hammett’s 3 major novels: ‘Red Harvest’, ‘The Maltese Falcon’, & ‘The Glass Key’ are seminal.

 

Harry Whittington – Another Fave for all same reasons as Day Keene- even the GM-Ace 2step. ‘The Woman Is Mine’ is a standout even among Whit’s bevy of good books. A Korean War vet on the beach at night trying to get his head back together after the recent war, sees a woman drugged-hypnotized-entranced wading straight out into the surf heedlessly deeper. He rescues her- she’s semi-amnesiac with only dim memories of the reality that she’s a wealthy heiress whose family-doctor-lawyer stand to profit hugely by her insanity or death…

 

Ross Macdonald – Has been called heir to Chandler. But Lew Archer is less flamboyant and the writing less flowery. Good plots and sophisticated social commentary are hallmarks of the series.

 

John Dickson Carr – A great plotter whose tales are often borderline and sometimes overtly supernatural. Some of the best yarns involve the investigations of Dr Gideon Fell, including the superlative ‘The Crooked Hinge’.

 

[Doohickamabob]

I don’t claim this list as comprehensive, so if you fave’s absent no slam intended.

No slam taken, but I will add James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith to the list.

[Pat Calhoun]

for sure. my original list was a combo of qualitative and quantitative, in that included authors had to have a number of novels or collections that saw vintage PB publication. + is good fun to have others chime in...as there was much fine writing going on.

Edited January 11, 2014 by pcalhoun

[adamstrange]

 

I'm a bit surprised about Tolkien's initial attitude, however, and as an Ivory Tower type professor, I'm guessing he didn't really understand much about affordable mass-market paperback books. He felt they were beneath him,

 

I think he felt they were beneath everyone. Books were very important to him and I would guess that he thought others should value great books highly enough to produce them in quality editions. He was not entirely convinced that what the industrial revolution wrought in the form of cheap mass production and large scaqle development was necessarily progress.

[Pat Calhoun]

and don't forget the timing and locale. this was just after the UK 'mushroom jungle' scandal when PB publishers were hauled into court, which led- rightly or wrongly (mostly wrongly)- to highbrows thinking of PBs as quite lowbrow.

[Pat Calhoun]

to give Donald A Wollheim & Ace SF a little airtime here's the only PB cover I've seen by Mort Lawrence.

[Sqeggs]

I was a kid at the time, but I dimly remember this being a big deal, with sic-fi/fantasy fans organizing a boycott of Ace. I may be misremembering, but wasn't Ace, in fact, not paying Tolkien a royalty on these unauthorized editions? Perhaps an agreement was reached later, or maybe I have the story wrong. Wouldn't be the first time!

 

I don't remember all of the specifics either, but I'm guessing Tolkien didn't get paid by Ace until the court ordered them to do so, which came about some years later. Wollheim was probably accurate in that the copyright had not been properly secured... but the court ruled against Ace anyway. And by that time Ace had made lots of money and publicity off of the matter, and likely still came out ahead.

 

Frustrated that he couldn't keep his books out of that disgusting paperback format, Tolkien relented and sold the authorized rights to Ballantine, who made a fortune off of endless reprintings. Of course, Tolkien and his estate made a fortune as well... something that would likely never have happened if the books remained in hardback only, and likely out of print for long periods of time.

 

I'm a bit surprised about Tolkien's initial attitude, however, and as an Ivory Tower type professor, I'm guessing he didn't really understand much about affordable mass-market paperback books. He felt they were beneath him, which means he must have considered himself at a loftier level than the likes of John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and just about every Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner up to that time!

 

 

Iirc, the first Ballantine edition had a unicorn under an apple tree or something similarly weird on the cover because the artist hadn't been given a copy of the book to read and was just told it was a fantasy! I'm sure that cemented Tolkien's opinion of paperbacks.

 

Probably was a class thing. I seem to remember years ago reading an article George Orwell wrote -- probably some time in the 1940s -- celebrating paperbacks because they made it possible for people with lower incomes to buy books.

[Pat Calhoun]

The bookcase I showed earlier has sat static for decades except for the 9 mushroom jungle (post-WWII UK PB scene with a plethora of small publishers providing lurid product) books I’ve put in there recently. The other 29 are on another shelf, as I have bought 36 in the last 6-8 months (started with 2). It’s been a wild wonderful ride, and as I was lamenting the lack of early-‘50s US SF PBs has truly fed me where I’m hungriest.

[jlee]

This is one of my all-time favorites.

[jlee]

The bookcase I showed earlier has sat static for decades except for the 9 mushroom jungle (post-WWII UK PB scene with a plethora of small publishers providing lurid product) books I’ve put in there recently. The other 29 are on another shelf, as I have bought 36 in the last 6-8 months (started with 2). It’s been a wild wonderful ride, and as I was lamenting the lack of early-‘50s US SF PBs has truly fed me where I’m hungriest.

 

Those are some really great covers Pat. Thanks for sharing and always providing wonderful information to help reinvigorate our collecting spirits!

[jlee]

Wish I had a nicer copy, but who wouldn't love this cover!

[jlee]

I love the Falcon series. Seems scarcer than most of the other digests and the covers are amazing.

[jlee]

I always get a kick when I see this one.

[jlee]

I would agree with this title.

 

[jlee]

Avons were always unique to me as they published comic books, digests, and paperbacks with the same title but sometimes different covers like this one.

[jlee]

Last and hopefully not the least for the night.

[BangZoom]

 

I love that group photo.

 

Wonderful collection, Pat.

 

[BangZoom]

This is one of my all-time favorites.

 

Here are a couple more paperbacks you might like.

 

Marihuana (Dell 10¢ edition) by William Irish

 

 

 

 

The French printing.

 

 

[Pat Calhoun]

thanks jlee & BZ & thanks for the Quickie