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Seduction of the Innocent: New stuff discovered
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50 posts in this topic

That is a pretty cool and obscure find! Seems reasonable to me that a case can be made for both books to be considered SOTI. Still, playing Devil's Advocate since you asked, The magic Dollar is an easy one to consider SOTI. However, I do see 2 problems with considering Peter Penny Saves the Day a SOTI book:

1) Wertham, "...writes about a comic book got out by the American Bankers Association..."  which really only mentions the one already published comic book cited by Sylvia Porter.

2) Are there any other books that are considered SOTI which are not even indirectly mentioned?

You know far more about SOTI than I ever will so of course I yield to your judgement. :foryou:

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I don't think both count. SotI references a singular book that was already released (or "got out" in Wertham's phrasing). That means Magic Dollar. Saves the Day was coming soon as of the Porter article.

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2 hours ago, SOTIcollector said:
16 hours ago, JollyComics said:

Cool information but is this in a right place?

I don't understand the question.  This is a golden age forum, and this is about a golden age book.  What am I missing?

You originally posted it in the sales forum and it got moved here. That's what he means

Edited by Jeffro.
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32 minutes ago, JollyComics said:

1+

Gladly your post is in a right place.

D'oh!  That's the second time I've posted something in the wrong forum when I was CERTAIN I had posted it in the right place.  I know where it belongs, and somehow I posted it in the wrong place anyway.  Thanks for clarifying.  I get it now.

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21 hours ago, Badger said:

That is a pretty cool and obscure find! Seems reasonable to me that a case can be made for both books to be considered SOTI. Still, playing Devil's Advocate since you asked, The magic Dollar is an easy one to consider SOTI. However, I do see 2 problems with considering Peter Penny Saves the Day a SOTI book:

1) Wertham, "...writes about a comic book got out by the American Bankers Association..."  which really only mentions the one already published comic book cited by Sylvia Porter.

2) Are there any other books that are considered SOTI which are not even indirectly mentioned?

You know far more about SOTI than I ever will so of course I yield to your judgement. :foryou:

I'm looking for a devil's advocate, so I appreciate the perspective.  Sure, I want this to be a new discovery.  But accuracy is what's most important. 

It seems to me that the verb tenses could be used to support the case for "Peter Penny Saves The Day" as being a SOTI book and "Peter Penny and his Magic Dollar" NOT being a SOTI book.

In the article, Porter talks about Magic Dollar, in the past tense, and discusses the upcoming Saves The Day.  Let's call the former MD, because that's easy, and let's just call the latter STD, because I find that acronym funny.

At the end of the article, Porter is describing books to be published in the future, rather than the ones already published, when she writes, "So as you read the comic pamphlets that undoubtedly will be coming your way in future months, realize fully that the aim is not just to amuse you.  Not by a long shot.  It is to instruct you in specific things, mold your thinking in a specific way."  So Porter was clearly referring to STD and its ilk.

Wertham didn't refer to any books matching Peter Penny's description in his 1948 Saturday Review of Literature article, nor in his 1953 Ladies' Home Journal preview of SOTI.  The first instance I could find of Wertham writing about one of these American Banker's Association books was in SOTI, which came out in April, 1954, a full five years after the Porter article.

Wertham: "Sylvia F. Porter, the financial columnist, writes about a comic book got out by the American Bankers Association:"

There's no way to know exactly when Wertham penned his words about Peter Penny, but it's virtually certain that by the time he wrote them both MD and STD had been "got out." 

The fact that Wertham quoted a Porter passage, and that passage referred to STD, could be used to support the assertion that Wertham was referring to STD.

That's my perspective, but I'm writing here for additional perspectives.  Everybody's welcome to chime in.  I'm eager to hear other opinions.

 

Edited by SOTIcollector
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And while we're at it, there's even more Peter Penny news!

It appears that there were at least FOUR printings of Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar!  Previously, three printings were known.  More about that in a bit.  Leading up to it, we have, here is some background about the book's distribution and print runs for anybody who cares.

The book was published by the American Banker's Association and sold to banks, who could order the back cover personalized with their own special message.  How much did banks pay for these books?  It depends on how many copies they ordered and what they wanted the back cover to say.   Here's the back cover of a copy they used to sell the idea to member banks.

PeterPennyAndHisMagicDollar_back_cover_downloaded_from_comicconnect2.jpg.e23bd6e5fac83197147d8bca7320cb9a.jpg

And here's a picture of what one of those personalized back covers looked like, after the bank paid for customization.

PeterPennyAndHisMagicDollar_back_cover_downloaded.jpg.b1c7d4db23d7c24b043ac5923ec814ed.jpg

 

The Sylvia Porter article got me searching for other articles about Peter Penny.  That led me to a couple different articles that mention the print runs and the number of printings.

On June 13, 1947, the Post Standard from Syracuse, NY reported that Magic Dollar had reached a circulation of a quarter million copies in its first two months.

Article_002_quarter_million_The_Post_Standard_Fri__Jun_13__1947_highlight.thumb.jpg.e45b8d9927270b876355f24fb3168ae3.jpg

Almost a year later, April 10, 1948, the Deseret News from Salt Lake City, Utah published this, indicating that there had been three printings totaling half a million books.

Article_003_Deseret_News_Salt_Lake_City_UT_Sat__Apr_10__1948_highlighted.thumb.jpg.03ec7fc8d29fe94f29db2f04daf85581.jpg

Prior to this article, I had identified three separate printings, and I thought maybe that was all there were.  But no, there are four known printings of Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar.

Details to come...

 

 

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3 hours ago, SOTIcollector said:

D'oh!  That's the second time I've posted something in the wrong forum when I was CERTAIN I had posted it in the right place.  I know where it belongs, and somehow I posted it in the wrong place anyway.  Thanks for clarifying.  I get it now.

You should thank to a nice Mod who moved your post to the right place.

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12 hours ago, JollyComics said:

You should thank to a nice Mod who moved your post to the right place.

Yes, I very much appreciate the efforts of a kind Mod who was nice enough to move my misplaced thread when they would have been well within their rights to just get rid of it.  I poked around the Moderation area, and I searched for the terms "mod" and "@mod", but I didn't see an obvious way to thank the Mod.   So for now I'll just state publicly "Thank you very much, Mod!".  If anybody has any recommendations for how I thank the Mod and ensure that they actually SEE my thanks, I'd appreciate it.

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4 hours ago, SOTIcollector said:

This is all the known printings so far.  But since we don't know what may come to light in the future, I'd hesitate to call these by a particular printing number.  The numbers above more to the sequence of the books that have been discovered to date than to the actual printing number.  I find it likely that these are first/second/third/fourth prints, but since John was just discovered, we don't know when another one will come along and throw a monkey wrench into that theory.

This sequence I came up with has the books shrinking in size over time, which makes sense because that's just want newsstand comics did over the years.

This sequence also has the art content changing slightly (losing first the three panels on the front page, and losing the detail in the logo, then later gaining sloppy lower panels).  All of this is consistent with a full package being delivered by a content producer to the American Banker's Association, and then as time went on the ABA made what changes they could make without hiring an artist to make those modifications.

So, thoughts?  Do you agree that these four versions came out in the sequence I outlined?

It seems like a reasonable first guess, with the standard qualifier that as more information or different copies come out the picture may change.

I think the term you're looking for, rather than printing, is "state".  When a book has no solid information on how many printings actually happened, but you can distinguish between versions and sort the order, that's the normal term.  I ran into it a lot when I put my collection of Oz books together, for instance.  You can have multiple states in a single printing, if something changes during the print run.  An example of that could be direct sales and newsstand editions, back when that was a thing; or an error correction.  The fix to Ka-Zar the Savage #12, where all but a few copies had a blank panel, is another example.   You can also have multiple actual print runs that, because they're identical, are all the same state.

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14 hours ago, OtherEric said:

It seems like a reasonable first guess, with the standard qualifier that as more information or different copies come out the picture may change.

I think the term you're looking for, rather than printing, is "state".  When a book has no solid information on how many printings actually happened, but you can distinguish between versions and sort the order, that's the normal term.  I ran into it a lot when I put my collection of Oz books together, for instance.  You can have multiple states in a single printing, if something changes during the print run.  An example of that could be direct sales and newsstand editions, back when that was a thing; or an error correction.  The fix to Ka-Zar the Savage #12, where all but a few copies had a blank panel, is another example.   You can also have multiple actual print runs that, because they're identical, are all the same state.

Great.  Thanks for the info. 

There are two other collectibles that I'm familiar with that commonly have the term "state" applied to them.  Based on this, I typically thought of "state" as something that is done after printing.

Seduction of the Innocent had a bibliography leaf when it was published (pp. 399-400), but that leaf was sliced out of most copies of the book by the publisher prior to distribution.  A few copies made it into the marketplace with the bibliography page intact.  Collectors typically refer to these books as "first state" (with bibliography) and "second state" (no bibliography).

When the Beatles issued their Yesterday and Today album, it contained a "butcher" photo that many found offensive.  So Capitol Records pasted a photo with a steamer trunk over the "butcher cover" and shipped the album with the innocuous cover displayed.  

 

Spoiler

The_Beatles_-_Butcher_Cover.jpg.05a0eac9da9d0b1c924a9b52300ee512.jpg

Collectors got wise and found ways to peel off the steamer trunk cover, which would reveal the offensive "butcher cover" underneath it (although the peel job would usually damage the butcher cover).  If you have one of those Yesterday and Today albums that never got pasted over, it's referred to by collectors as "first state."  An album with the pasteup intact is "second state".  An album that once had a pasteup, but from which the pasteup has been removed, is a "third state."

That was pretty much the limit of my experience in using the word "state" to describe different versions of collectibles.  I appreciate your perspective, which seems broader than mine, regarding how this term is used in the book collecting world.

It does seem likely that these Peter Penny books are distinct printings, given that with each subsequent issue either the size changed, or the content changed, or both.  Although, as you noted, we don't know for sure what was first or what may have come in between.  Thanks for letting me (and other boardies) know how the term "state" can be used here. 

 

Edited by SOTIcollector
Oops. Forgot a couple quotation marks.
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1 hour ago, SOTIcollector said:

This one isn't exactly a new discovery, but it's still exciting to add to my collection of Seduction of the Innocent books that was already complete.

Now that I have all the books that Wertham is known to have mentioned in SOTI, there's not a lot of room for the collection to grow.  However, every now and then I'm able to turn up something fun to add to the collection.

I've been looking for a while at Fox Giants, since they are made up of remaindered copies of other books.  In a few cases, I've been fortunate enough to turn up SOTI books inside Fox Giants. What I hadn't thought to do is try to hunt down the EC annuals. 

I stumbled onto two available copies of WSF Annual #2, and it hit me that I should be checking these for SOTI books.  Lo and behold, both of the copies I checked happened to contain Weird Science #19.  This is a book that was not just mentioned, but pictured, in SOTI.  So I'm thrilled to add this new SOTI book to my collection.

I consider this to be more of an "honorable mention" SOTI book than an actual SOTI book, since it's far more likely that Wertham saw the story in the regular 10-cent book than in this annual. Still, I thought it was a cool pickup and I was excited to add it to the collection.

 

48AD636D-7B15-4849-93DC-88147AC3A2D0.jpeg

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You make a really good point!  CGC should note when EC Annuals are SOTI books.  I guess Overstreet cannot because the contents change.

I gotta say, though, you need a new GA collecting focus to occupy your time.  Meeting a collecting goal is great and horrible at the same time.  You do it, and you have to find a new goal.  Given how much intellectual energy you put into your collecting, I'd suggest you go after comics that are off the beaten path, yet culturally significant like some of the red scare giveaways or other themes of that nature.

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Spot on, great info! SOTI is always a fascinating topic for discussion, education and occasionally new info for collectors. In fact, maybe the time is right for a warts and all thread devoted to Fredric Wertham.  There’s a lot more to this gentleman’s involvement in comics history than SOTI.

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