How To Care For 'Rare' Books?

[K. Riehl]

If you like Carl Bark's work Jerry Weist, who wrote the paperback price guides, has passed away and his collection is being sold on EBay. He has many examples of Bark's work starting at reasonable prices.
He sells under Rolocbard and is reputable: I have bought dozens of items from him. He also is selling some Forry Ackerman items.

 

[Extollager]

Thanks. I have a Barks checklist (found online) and it appears that I have most of the longer stories (such as "Back to the Klondike," "The Ghost of the Grotto," the Viking ship one, "The Mines of King Solomon," etc.) and many of the 8- or 10-page comedies as reprints if not in their original forms, and this is fine with me. I don't suppose there are any comics for which I'd be prepared to pay collectors' prices.

This thread's on how to care for rare books, so my writing on comics at all is by your indulgence, everyone; and as for how I care for these, the original printings are typically stored in comic book bags or even old bread bags that were never used for bread. We got a bunch of these, I don't remember just how....

 

[JunkMonkey]

At the risk of getting things thrown at me by collectors, my solution to my comic book storage problem is to treat each comic like a signature and make books out of them. As this involves punching holes in them, ripping out the staples, and slapping quantities of glue all over them, this reduces their resale value to nothing but makes them a damn site easier to store and read. (For one thing you never have to search for misfiled copies of the next book in a series. On the downside the only disadvantage I can think of is that if you have crossover editions of a comic you may end up having to get two copies and sew them into both runs - for instance I have made books from the whole of the Vertigo Black Orchid run which, for one episode, spilled over into Swamp Thing (136?) which I dutifully included into the Black Orchid book. If I were to start reading collecting old Swamp Things I'd have to buy another copy of Swamp Thing 136 to include.)

Here's a 'How I do it' I posted in another forum.
http://classiccomics.boards.net/thread/1069/binding-comics

 

[steelyglint]

I doubt many collectors would be displeased by your decision to remove the 'collectability' of your comics. More likely they'll be quietly pleased. Every copy taken out of the running means fewer around, and the fewer copies there are the higher the price goes.

I'd be quite over the moon if someone told me they'd just rebound, disbound or destroyed 792 copies of the limited edition proof of P.F. Hamilton's 'Misspent Youth'. Since I own 8 copies of it I'd have the only collectable copies in existence.

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