W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S #1 gold foil variant cover

W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S #1 cover

The nineties comic book boom (and subsequent crash) was based on two factors that are still cavorting through the forest of comics today. One is the Unicorn of variant covers, the other is the lion of investor speculation. See how nimbly they prance!

The resale of comic books was viewed as a big business, and the launch of Image comics meant that savvy comic book buyers could get in on the ground floor of a gold mine by purchasing every #1 Image had to publish.

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I have always been enamored with the Roycrofters–that very late nineteenth and early twentieth-century guild of artisans in upstate NY named after the seventeenth-century printers Samuel and Thomas Roycroft of London. Heavily influenced by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, Elbert Hubbard founded the guild and formed a community of printers, bookbinders, furniture makers, and other craftsmen. He also set up a private press, the Roycroft Press. This week at PBA Galleries’ Thursday auction of “fine books in all fields” and “fine literature,” several Roycrofter titles are looking for buyers. The most elaborate of which is the 1900 title, So Here Then is the Last Ride (seen below). Full Post…

For those of you who have been reading our summer issue, you might be as surprised as I was to learn about a folk artist named Clementine Hunter. This story actually started out as a bookish travel piece about Melrose Plantation in Louisiana, once home to an interesting woman named Cammie Henry, who turned it into a colony for writers and artists, creating her own little Southern Renaissance. But we couldn’t help but feel that Hunter, a field hand and plantation cook who was encouraged to put paint on canvas by some of the visiting artists (and whose work is now quite collectible), was a bigger part of the picture. Coincidentally, just as we were finishing up this article, Hunter, who died in 1988, was making national news. Full Post…

What may be the most northerly printed book is going under the hammer today (July 21) at Lawrence’s Auctioneers in Somerset. Lot number 3170 features the Polar Almanac, printed on board the H.M.S. Enterprise while it was wintering in a remote Arctic bay, a scant 120 miles from the North Pole.  The ship was commanded by Admiral Collinson and was part of an extensive search effort to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin and his polar expedition.  Sir Franklin, commanding the H.M.S. Terror and the Erebus, had set sail in 1846 to traverse the last unexplored section of the Northwest Passage.   Full Post…

Catalogue Review: Ken Lopez, No. 155The newest catalogue from Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Massachusetts, has a very distinct focus: uncorrected proofs & advance copies. In his introduction (which is well worth a read), he writes, “Combining their historical scarcity, and likely future scarcity, with the textual variations that are often found — and which, by definition, represent a state of the text closer to the author’s original manuscript — the value in collecting proof copies becomes, we think, self-evident.”Even titles so new as Delillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding from 2005 is collectible in this format; a signed uncorrected proof  is $300. Full Post…

Another Chris-written article, which means you should expect this to be super-hero toy heavy. In my defense, 90% of the articles Loran have written as of late have been Transformers based and FPNYC IS a comic shop, so my topic is warranted, given our average customers interest. And I do talk about the occasional Revoltech and statue from time to time. Anywho, “My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic” is apparently the new hottness, as “Bronies” (This is a legit nickname apparently. I think

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