2020 · Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California: PBA Galleries, 2020. Limited Edition. Quarto. 151 pages, Limited edition of only 20 copies, the present copy is #16. I could not resist watching this auction especially since it had a great selection of the pre-code horror which my friend Jack Fink and I bought as soon as they hit the newsstand at Courtney's Drug Store in East St. Louis in 1953. The pressure on the publishers to stop such filth only led to our dismay. It is true, we saw drawings of people eating rotting flesh, robbing graves and other parts of the worst examples of human behavior but somehow, we led fairly mundane lives as was my case using the cover of an antiquarian bookseller. Fine Books and Collectibles covered the auction and noted that those comics which I discarded by the late 1950's such as Weird Mysteries, No. 5 brought $19,000. While by the late 1960's my literary and artistic tastes and taken an interest in the work of Robert Crumb (especially Snatch Comics which led to the arrests of the clerk at City Lights though the case was thrown out when the San Francisco Police could not produce the evidence in which they had taken such delight at the Police Station lunchroom. Now in my old age, I think of the violence and gore in Homer's Illiad and Odyssey and take pleasure in the mastery of the Greek rhythm that Professor Fagels has used. In short, the rich color of the great comics as well as the very rare pre-code comics unearthed make this an essential item for the connoisseur of great comics. Bound in black cloth, spine plain, in color pictorial dust jacket. Fine.
(Inventory #: 027974)