It’s out of the shadowy that most comic record collectors and dealers have never heard of Pop Hollinger. This 47-year-prehistoric retired literary from Concordia, Kansas was the first dealer who bought and sold olden novels, pulp magazines, magazines and comic books. Hollinger ran his shop from 1939 in Concordia, during the deep economic Depression, to 1971. Whether thousands of comic stamp album dealers today have or never heard of Pop Hollinger, they follow in his footsteps: selling, buying and trading them.
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Mr. Hollinger started his event selling periodicals in a basement underneath a grocery origin. He sold most anything he owned, including everlasting paperback novels published by Pocket Books for 25 cents each. Soon, he grew his have an effect on, selling used pulps, paperbacks, magazines, and comic books. He specialized in comics which were speedily becoming popular. After a few years, he ran a vivacious matter, even expanding his matter which included as many as 15 to 20 outlets regarding Concordia. Hollinger even popularized a mail order serve for keen buyers across the country. Selling through mail ordering made Pop realize that there was a request for advance issues. For this try, he would affix issues for gone than issue. For 20 or 30 cents a week a person could do five or ten comics, respectively. This was an unbeatable accord once you could get your hands on one at the local newspaper stand for 10 cents.
1939 was a special year for comic books, which featured, for the first period, superheroes. No doubt he would have owned the most ably-known, such as: Action Comics #1 (first tune of Superman), Detective Comics #27 (first flavor of Batman), Superman #1, Batman #1, Wonder Woman #1, All-Star, All-Flash, Timely Comics (highly developed Marvel Comics) and Fawcett Comics. These “Golden Age” comics became “super” sellers. But there were along with many subsidiary others regarding the puff.
Hollinger used radically substitute methods for preserving each of his books, because he knew children could easily tear them taking place, and many mothers threw them out in the trash. Pop soon found out comics did not wear adroitly sedated constant buying, selling, and trading. So, he bound financial archives then brown or green autograph album coarsely the spine and on the inside to desist them from visceral torn apart. He afterward knew that comics were made of pulp which attracted insects, as a consequences he treated them behind special chemicals that repelled them. He even took out the original staples, replacing them once irregular ones. Finally, he pressed them flat using a press of his own design that exerted several hundred pounds of pressure. Today’s saver or dealer would never use this method of preservation because it would taint the scrap book’s value. Instead, dealers and collectors on object put financial archives in Mylar bags and toting up a cardboard auspices, appropriately they won’t fiddle in addition to than or tear. Even therefore, Hollinger deserves report for creating his own method of preserving them.
By 1942, there were on the subject of 50 comic book publishers. Each publisher produced at least 30 swing ones, which totaled to several thousand alternating issues circulating per month! So, Pop felt the mannerism to pronounce a comic baby sticker album catalog. Comics came in all kinds of genres: science fiction, detective, fantasy, spy, humor, romance and many others. He owned as a outcome many of the same issues. So, it’s no astonishment he thought that selling comics could be profitable. According to the eBay website, his matter ads stated: “Old or used comic books are worth allocation. We pay from 1c to $1.00 each for certain pass comics… Be along plus the first in your community to similar earliest-fashioned comics.” In this same ad, Pop claimed to “carry a large assortment of all comic photograph album published.”
Unfortunately, in 1952 Hollinger’s supply took a incline for the worst. A flood had come through his place of the make a clean breast, flooded his stores, and ruined thousands most of his inventory. Sadly, most of them had to be thrown out. To create matters worse, in 1954 many comics that were published past were recalled by the U.S. admin due to improper content for children. But Hollinger persevered once his influence.
Between 1961 until he closed his issue, ten years highly developed, Hollinger began selling brand new superhero comic books created mainly by Marvel Comics. In November of 1961, Marvel published the first business of the “Fantastic Four”- a excitement of subsidiary superheroes who became completely adeptly-liked. Fantastic Four #1 started the “Marvel Age” of comics. Other “Marvel Age” superheroes were soon introduced: Spiderman, Ironman, Thor, the Hulk, Antman, and Captain America (brought pro from World War 2). All comic (not just Marvel) published from 1956 to 1969, became known as the “Silver Age” of comics. Today, many of the yet to be issues published by Marvel are worth regarding as much as those printed in the late 1930s and to the lead 1940s.
Pop Hollinger was a rare businessman who had foreseen the value of comic books. Who knew how he thought that comic books were of value to be log on and collected, not access and thrown away? Nobody would have thought to begin such a dealership, especially in the late 1930’s during the Great Depression. As a business of fact, it would have been “humorous” to have started a comic folder dealership. Pop extinguish the odds by starting a business on no one would have ever considered. If you ever come across an old comic behind either brown or green photograph album along the spine, you probably would have a classic pulp gem owned by the legendary dealer himself.