This week I decided to get rid of about twenty newspaper books I bought about fifteen years ago when I first started buying stuff n Ebay. Back then there were more postage options, including a mailbag that would everything it could hold for $45. Very cheap, even though it took three months to get here. I got all sorts of these books from may different papers and year, ranging from the early nineteen tens to the fifties. I have been wanting to sell them for a couple of years, because they take up a lot of space, but the rise in postage costs means that they are impossible to sell back to America. The sale price ($40 t0 $80, I guess) could possibly be lower than the postage. So after a lot of deliberation I am going to cut them up and sell different pages separately and (sadly) throw away the rest. Anyway, that led to a discussion with my wife (a librarian) about the historical mistake of American libraries in the seventies to start throwing away these books and putting them on microfiche. It now turns out those books have kept better than the microfiche copies, some of which are fading or scratched because of frequent use.
Still, there is an upside to it. Many of these microfiche photo's are now being scanned and added to various online collections. I have used several of these over the years for this blog. Today's post is mostly filled with scanned microfiche material as well, a large run of Rube Goldberg's Boob McNutt from two time periods - 191 and 1930. In between them I have a couple of self scanned color Sundays from 1924. Actually, I have many more from that period waiting to be scanned, but at least this is a start. Before those, I have a very interesting series of Sunday gags by an artist called Farr about famous figures from history coming back. I labelled those Boob McNutt as well and I can only imagine that they were from the same paper before Boob McNutt began - which would mean the June 9 Sunday I have here is actually the first one.
3 comments:
Now that universities have comics collections, perhaps one of them would offer a home for your bound volumes. Here in the US such a donation grants you a break on your income tax. Maybe that doesn't work in your country. Donation may just be throwing money away.
When I attended college in the late 1960s I spent half my life in the library's immense bound-newspaper room. They had everything from big titles like the Hearst papers to obscurities like [i]PM.[/i] It's there I was introduced to Caniff, Sickles, Graff and Christman. I experienced the splendor of full-page Sunday Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and Terry and the Pirates. I discovered Warren Tuft's Casey Ruggles and Lance as well as Coulton Waugh's Hank. Some runs went back to to the days of Little Nemo and Nibsy the Newsboy. It was heaven!
Many years later a fire broke out there and the sprinklers destroyed the entire collection. Since then I've been inclined to urge keeping bound volumes whole...they might be the last copies around.
I know one or two of these, I'll ask them.
It's strange how some people opt to store these strips. Will Eisner spent a lot of money keeping the zinc plates used for printing the Spirit comics from the 40s, by storing them and protecting them with the original artwork!
Those zinc plates are practically unusable nowadays (plus way a ton), just as the microfiche files you mention. I've seen newspapers through away all thier photographs and seving them first as microfiches an then as files on a computer, that will be obsolete in a couple of years.
Any one remember the diskettes, or jaz drives? Well, they are unreadable nowadays.
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