Comic Cuts — 11 August 2023

I managed to get the Badger book layouts started, but it has been painfully slow. I pieced together four pages on my first day, and one page on day two, although admittedly there were distractions as it was the weekend. And Mel had Monday and Tuesday off, so we're both suffering from jet-lag, not knowing what day it is.

I thought I'd tackle some of the easier sections, only to discover that there aren't any easier sections! Everything needed work and — as a for instance — I spent a whole morning trying to fill a couple of gaps I had in the last of Badger's output (it's not widely known that they were still publishing in the 1970s). I'm now missing just one ISBN, which may never have been used. I then had to sort out the index, which was not difficult, but dull, repetitive work that seemed to take forever. To give you an idea of the scale of Badger's output, the three lists I'm including — the third being the magazine checklist — run to 27,000 words. The layout for the main checklist alone is 20 pages and has 66 illustrations, all of which needed to be cleaned and resized.

And I've still got 100+ pages to go.

I'll be taking a break next week to finish off the other two books I'm working on, which is why you haven't seen the Trials cover yet. I still have some corrections to do with the motorcycling book, which I have been waiting on, and trying to keep all these plates spinning isn't always easy. Sometimes you just have to pick one and work on that.

So what have I discovered this week? This won't mean much to anyone who doesn't collect Fifties gangster paperbacks, but I think I've identified the two authors of six Hyman Zore novels, although I'm working from photocopies of first chapters only, so I'm putting a question mark against everything. There's a third author I can't identify, but whose novel appears to be a rip-off of James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish.

Sorting through Badger scans I spotted a few more American reprint covers, and thanks to the folks over on Facebook's Vintage Paperback and Pulp Forum we've nailed down the source of one of them. Just a few more to go. You can see two in our header, with art by Tom R---- (I can't read the signature, see above) and Robert Schulz. I'm pretty sure that Warsmoke is also an American reprint, but I can find no signature. They are likely to be from Ace or Avon c.1960.

I've had a problem with Gmail for a while because Google changed their requirements for addresses that are their own domain, such as bearalley.co.uk. They now require that every domain needs SPF or DKIM. The latter stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and apparently I need to be signed in as a super administrator in order to set this up. What does that even mean?

The change at Google means that any message I send to a Gmail address bounces. So if you've contacted me in the past few weeks and you have not received a reply, this might be why. (It might just be because I have been busy, but I do try to respond within a few days.)

I've struggled with this problem for the past couple of weeks and I still can't get my head around setting up the necessary identifiers that Gmail requires. So I've set up a new Gmail account that I can use to respond to Gmail enquiries. If you want to get in touch, use the usual address; if you're on Gmail, you'll get a reply from bearalleybooks at a Gmail address. I wasn't planning to keep checking the Gmail address, but I see that someone has already responded to it rather than responding to my normal address. Oh, well, I'll just have to keep an eye on that. Hopefully this is a workable work-around the problem.