“Kids’ books by famous people should be snapped up in quantity and kept pristine, because the kids ruin 99 percent of them and condition is everything. Get it autographed and your grandkids are set for life.”
I sell a lot of kids books in our store. They go out as soon as I get them in. It is mostly nostalgia for those adults that grew up reading them as myself. Unfortunately none of them have been autographed by the writer. If they were autographed they would go to auction at great profit.
I wish I had all my old DC comic books from my childhood in the 50s and 60s. Some of them are worth a great deal of money today. Some were first edition. Back then I did not know what a first edition was. If it was new I bought for pennies. Actually my parents bought it for me. I would pick a few comics off the rack and take them to my parents for purchase. Back then all of us kids had stacks and would trade them back and forth for comics we had not read. They had little value then. If I had of only known what they would be worth today.
“Sacre Bleue” If you read the comic books back then you know what I said.
I know there were horror comic books out there, which eventually got banned. We were not allowed to buy those, and we really didn’t want to.
However, those banned comic books are probably worth a fortune today.
I had lot of Archie comics until very recently. My daughter devoured them. I even tripped over a box of them and dislocated my shoulder. I found they were almost worthless and gave them away, but they too will probably be valuable someday.
My treasure is a Little Lulu. I paid $9 for it years ago at a comic convention. Little Lulu was my favorite. It says “still 10c” on the cover. She is showing two boys how to build a building in a sandbox and is holding a blueprint in her hand. That makes it sound modern. Somebody tell me it is worth a ton of money because it is “women’s lib.”
By the way, I know why a certain issue of Evergreen Review caused such an uproar. Yes, it was porn for those days (1960s), but it also showed a beautiful black man and a beautiful white woman naked together in the woods.
I know because I was at Praeger at the time, which was one flight below (I think) Grove Press (and one flight above a Shoprite), on University Place, and someone brought it down to show it to us. It’s funny that all the talk was about the porn aspect and nothing about the racial aspect, which was the real reason for all the fuss. Talk about collector’s items!