Comic Cuts — 4 August 2023

Quick pause to say "I can't believe it's August already." OK, that's done... let's get on.

I attended my first Paperback & Pulp Book Fair in ages on Sunday and had a thoroughly enjoyable day, catching up with some old friends and meeting a few people I knew only through Facebook.

Maurice Flanagan & Rian Hughes

I stopped going around 2000, having just had the rug pulled from under me when MS Publishing canned Science Fiction World, which I had given up a steady job on another magazine to edit. We managed four issues, but it was screwed before the first issue even came out. But that's a story for another day.

Faced with trying to survive on writing alone again I made some decisions, one of which was that I'd scale back trips out that weren't paying for themselves. If I remember correctly, I was still getting sent quite a few review copies of books, so I would take those up to the book fairs to sell, and that would pay for my train fare, plus a little spending money. Over the next couple of years the review copies dried up, and the prices of the kind of books I went to the book fairs to buy began to soar as eBay brought in buyers from further afield—especially America. Now, American collectors generally demand high grade books, but they're happy to pay for quality. Unfortunately, seeing top dollar prices on eBay also drags up the price of what you might call reading copies that are rough around the edges; the kind of book that collectors buy as a filler but try to replace.

Steve Chibnall and Stephen James Walker

I found myself priced out of the market and having no new books to write about, my interest dried up. Any money I had went instead on researching the circumstances around Hank Janson's trials, which involved some serious amounts of money spent getting copies of documents from the National Archive. I don't remember doing any promotion for the book when Trials came out in 2004 apart from an interview on BBC Essex.

I went to a few comic fairs in the mid- to late-2000s, often signing at the Book Palace table, but I don't recall attending anything since we moved to Wivenhoe thirteen years ago. So it's at least that long since I saw a lot of my book and comic collecting pals.

David Hyman & Martin Heaphy

This was the first fair held at the Holiday Inn, I believe, and I imagine it won't be the last. There was a hallway that led into two halls, the smaller of the two housing the paperback dealers and the larger dedicated to hardbacks, postcards and ephemera, but also with a smattering of paperbacks. The moment I walked into the smaller hall I spotted people I knew. To my left, Rian Hughes and Yak El Droubie of Korero Press, who published Rayguns & Rocketships, and to my right, Steve Chibnall and Stephen James Walker, the latter of Telos Publishing who put out the first edition of Trials of Hank Janson. They were promoting Miniature Marvels: The Book-Cover Art of James E. McConnell, but I also took along my copy of Hank Janson Under Cover and got them both signed. Lugging those three books up to London was something I'll be happy never to do again... and to think that I was planning originally to take up the two Reg Heade volumes...

Thanks to David Hyman, Martin Heaphy, Bob Wardzinski, Jamie Sturgeon, Paul Duncan, Maurice Flanagan, Roger Robinson, and many others, the day seemed to fly by. The exciting news is that there seems to be a lot going on, with projects ranging from a collection of cartoons and illustrations by Arthur Ferrier to a new British comic-based magazine. Even after I left, I was walking down the road with Paul Duncan discussing two projects he has been working on—the John M. Burns' collections and a long-awaited biography of Gerald Kersh. Like I said, there's a lot going on.

Jamie Sturgeon

I was able to talk to a number of people about ideas for upcoming projects. Being surrounded by collectors is a good place to try to blag scans — as I keep explaining to people, I have dozens of features I'd love to write but I'm often held back by not having the cover scans I need to illustrate them. Hopefully my pleading hasn't fallen on deaf ears.

Everyone seemed to have a great day, so I'm hoping that there will be another fair in 2024, by which time I'll have some of these long-promised projects of my own to show off.

Talking of which... I've had a fairly slow week, sorting out the final corrections on A Laverda Journey, George Coates' tale of his trip around the world by motor bike that I'm publishing as a companion to And the Wheels Went Round and starting to sort out all the scans I'm going to need for Beyond the Void: The Remarkable History of Badger Books, which will include features on some of the best of Badger's SF output — the A J Merak novels — and the very worst — a look at the astonishing stories of Barney Ward, which I'm very pleased to say will have a nice little bonus as I've found a third novel by Ward. I really wish I had a bigger collection of these old Fifties paperbacks as I'm sure I could i.d. many more authors. Unfortunately, the last collection that came up for grabs sold for something like £65,000. Not the sort of loose change I have... that's more like 65p and I'd need to check behind the cushions of the sofa to get that much.