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Pictures of old Comic stands
John C:
--- Quote from: Geo on July 19, 2010, 06:43:17 PM ---Distribution wasn't the best it seems, spotty at best, it seems during that time. At least it was that way in the area I was raised in.
--- End quote ---
It occasionally seems to have taken nosedives, too. I can remember books--even semi-major titles, like Green Lantern and the like--failing to make it to the shelves as late as the mid-80s.
I also had a peculiar run-in with clerks, by the way. In my case, a magazine shop that was selling used comics, over the course of a month, somehow metamorphosized into an adult bookshop. In itself, that might have been mildly awkward, but they hadn't changed the signs, so I wandered the store for a good ten minutes (I couldn't have been more than fifteen at the time) before asking for help and getting panicked shouting answers from clerks who apparently didn't notice me walk in. They also denied having ever sold comics...
Interestingly, that shop is still open (and selling adult videos) after...hmm...more years than I care to think about. No, I don't shop there. I pass it daily on my commute.
Oh, right. Counting titles. If it seems like I'm teaching a lecture, it's not condescension, but rather me not ever wanting to do this again...
You'll need a few ingredients. The GCD is a big one. You'll also need Firefox with the Table2Clipboard add-on (a favorite toy of mine). Lastly, Microsoft Excel will be very, very handy. (Or, if you're just happy with a single number of titles printed in 1952, jump to the end and save yourself some fairly dry reading.)
I hit the GCD's advanced search, and asked for Issues (rather than Stories, the default), Starting with 1/1/1952 and Ending 12/31/1952, published in the United States and in English.
If anybody with influence over the searching mechanism happens to be reading, I'd really prefer the issues to be the default, a more obvious way to use the date (even a single example to show that "1952" only turns up a dozen or so books), and maybe a checkmark to say, "yes, I want everything at once instead of chopping into result pages." But those are minor nitpicks in the grand scheme.
Anyway, click "Search" and start harvesting. On each page, right-click the table. If you installed Table2Clipboard, you'll see it in the context menu that pops up, and from there, you can "Copy Whole Table." Do so, then paste it into Excel, then (with Ctrl-End and some minor arrowing) get ready for the next page. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now I have an awkward spreadsheet with every book published in 1952 in Excel. First thing, select all the data (Ctrl-A) and if you're an old fogey like me that still uses menus (i.e., I can't help you if you're using Office 2007 or something, with the "ribbon" up top), Edit, Clear, Formats, gets you something more readable.
Then for some minor magic tricks. Thankfully, I don't care about the Date column, because it's about to get trashed. Select the Issue column (C in mine), and click Tools, Text to Columns. Delimited text, split on "Other," an open parenthesis. Since the GCD names the books as "Title (year series) #nn," this gives us a clean series title. Try to ignore the little flags on the left. I have no idea how to select them en masse to delete them, but they're harmless...
Now, sort (Data, Sort) on the column that has the titles. And then run down the list and delete all those headers you copied in--they'll sort together, to make it easy to nuke the rows at once.
We're almost there, I promise, and here's the neat part. Select your data again, plus one more column to the right. Now hit the menus for Data, Subtotals, which I want to know why nobody told me about it! At each change in your (sorted) title name column, tell it to Count (not that it really makes a difference) and put the subtotal into (at least) the empty column. Excel will then busily insert bolded rows with your title and...well, the number of things in the empty column for that title, so zero.
But that's OK, because we don't care how many issues of Frogman Comics we have for the year (if you did, put the subtotal in an otherwise-used column), but rather how many titles. Which means we need to count those zeroes. So...go down to the lower-right of your data (Ctrl-End), and type something LIKE the following:
=COUNT(F2:F2153)
(The equals sign tells Excel to get to work. Count is self-explanatory. F is the column where I put the subtotals. I start at row #2, because the headers are in the first row, and end at row #2153, because that's the row where the final subtotal (for Young Romance) is sitting.
If all went well, it should only take a few minutes (it took me more time to explain this than do it), and you'll get an answer.
For 1952, I got a fairly large-sounding 418 titles. On the other hand, I know that, today, companies track the top-300 in sales, so that means the market must be far more crowded.
(Trickier would be to have the spreadsheet screen out books that only got an issue or two out, but I'm waaay too lazy to deal with that. One approach would be to take a recent GCD dump, load it into a database system, and write some SQL, which would get that answer in one step. But I also realize that's not exactly appealing to the average home user.)
Drusilla lives!:
--- Quote from: John C on July 20, 2010, 04:46:09 PM ---
I also had a peculiar run-in with clerks, by the way. In my case, a magazine shop that was selling used comics, over the course of a month, somehow metamorphosized into an adult bookshop. In itself, that might have been mildly awkward, but they hadn't changed the signs, so I wandered the store for a good ten minutes (I couldn't have been more than fifteen at the time) before asking for help and getting panicked shouting answers from clerks who apparently didn't notice me walk in. They also denied having ever sold comics...
--- End quote ---
The horror, the HORROR! :)
--- Quote from: John C on July 20, 2010, 04:46:09 PM ---... If all went well, it should only take a few minutes (it took me more time to explain this than do it), and you'll get an answer.
For 1952, I got a fairly large-sounding 418 titles. On the other hand, I know that, today, companies track the top-300 in sales, so that means the market must be far more crowded. ...
--- End quote ---
Or I could have just read that New Yorker piece recommended by Yoc (which I just got around to doing)...
--- Quote ---...more than twenty publishers were putting out close to six hundred and fifty titles a month. Eighty to a hundred million comic books were sold every week; according to contemporary reports, the average issue was passed along to six or more readers. ...
--- End quote ---
... but seriously, I know how difficult it is working with that GCD search and you did a great job of it, thanks John. :)
Btw, that quoted 650 number is reported in David Hajdu's "The Ten-Cent Plague."
Drusilla lives!:
--- Quote ---...more than twenty publishers were putting out close to six hundred and fifty titles a month. Eighty to a hundred million comic books were sold every week; according to contemporary reports, the average issue was passed along to six or more readers. ...
--- End quote ---
Wait a second... that's 80 to 100 MILLION comics sold each WEEK?!? That's 320 to 400 MILLION comics sold a MONTH!
But according to the census records for 1950, the population of the United States was approximately 151 million? Either that's a lot of comics going over to Europe or that number is rather funky IMO... and what's with the "the average issue was passed along to six or more readers" stuff, I know that was the spiel you would find on the cover to Crime Does Not Pay, but I thought that was discounted long ago by comic scholars as a sales gimmick on Gleason's part.
EDIT: Dug out my old copy of Nicky Wright's "The Classic Era of American Comics" and according to him Gleason's CDNP, BOY and Daredevil had combined sales of almost a million copies in 1943, with CDNP accounting for the biggest percentage of that... by 1947 he states that circulation of Gleason's titles had topped two million copies a month, again with CDNP (by then one of the best selling titles of the era) accounting for a large portion of that total. I recall him mentioning similar numbers somewhere in that book for Superman in the early-to-mid 40s... that is, a little over a million copies sold each month being typical for Superman (at the height of his popularity).
Just for the record... he also states that by 1940 there were 168 various comic book titles (from 24 publishers) with combined monthly sales between 12 and 15 million copies.
So it appears that for a comic to be considered "a huge success" back then it would have to break at least a million copies a month (or per issue), on a consistent basis.
paw broon:
My experiences were obviously not in N. America but in Scotland, a country of only 5 million people. And from distribution of American comics starting in 1959, there seemed to be comics everywhere. Any wee corner shop and newsagent had bundles on the counter and later spinners appeared. (There were also bundles of Australian comics, which also came in as ballast) Many newsagents also sold American mens mags (Blue Book? etc.) on the same spinners and it was very embarrasing going in with your mother and/or sister for a comic and having that other stuff adjacent. In the cities (in my experience, Glasgow and Edinburgh) there were a number of 2nd hand bookshops which sold comics and adult mags and books and some of those shops were quite seedy - but cheap. As to readership, when I worked on newspapers, the readership to sales ratio was considered to be about 3 or 4 to 1.
Love these pics of newsstands and wish I could contribute some local ones but I can find nothing. I'll kep looking.
John C:
--- Quote from: Drusilla lives! on July 20, 2010, 07:00:12 PM ---what's with the "the average issue was passed along to six or more readers" stuff, I know that was the spiel you would find on the cover to Crime Does Not Pay, but I thought that was discounted long ago by comic scholars as a sales gimmick on Gleason's part.
--- End quote ---
It had better be. If it's not, then...well, four million books per month, read by "an average" of six people sharing, means that, globally, nearly two and a half billion comics were read during each month. By pure coincidence (I hope...), that happens to also be the global population (estimated) in 1950 to a fairly good tolerance.
If we assume that each reader read every title, just to drive the numbers down, that means that one in every six hundred humans would have read comics. And somehow, I don't think we can assume that's the case. More likely, we're talking about typical consumers reading only a dozen or so books, meaning that one in every ten to twenty people would have to read.
That's globally, mind you. If we further assume that the Iron Curtain didn't have strong sales in Commie-bashing heroes and mutilation of half-naked women, the rest of us would have needed to pick up the slack. Oh, right. And the unindustrialized and less literate parts of the world at the time, like the majority of the South Pacific, Africa, and South America. They probably didn't read many comics, either.
So there's still something seriously off with the numbers. Let's face it, if there were half a billion sales per month (rounding up the hundred million per week), that's HUGE business and a lot of infrastructure for a penny or two revenue (not profit) per sale. I feel that, if that were the case, the Victor Foxes would have tried to add value and raise prices to get a bigger piece of the few millions of dollars per month we're talking about.
It almost calls the author's other numbers into question, seeing as how his title count is half bigger than my count from the GCD. I realize the GCD isn't authoritative, but for them to be missing a third of the books published during a year seems improbable.
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