As to the $5 price for the catalog, well I am not sure if Argosy did this, but I remember seeing a lot of the ads in 70s comics for back issue catalogs and such that charged for them (usually less than $5) but it was refunded with first order or partially so, so the price was to cover the making and shipping of the catalog, but those that actually did business (and not just got the catalog with no future business resulting) did not end up paying full price (or anything) for the catalog.

So yes $5 was a lot in 1965, but there may have been more to it in the details.

-M

There is nothing "logical" about permanently sealing a magazine designed to be read inside a plastic shell where you can't open it.

There is nothing logical about collecting and said collectibles being worth millions of dollars when you get right down to it. People decide that Action Comics #1 is worth millions because it has historical significance as an object. Okay, I get it, but fundamentally it's still a collection of paper that cost cents to produce. I completely understand people of moderate means stumbling over an issue of Action #1 or Detective #27 and selling them for a fortune, but I'll never be able to understand the mentality of people, even though they have vast resources, who would spend that much money for something like that. It becomes about the object itself and not the content and characters, which is problematic to me.

You don't have to understand it, though, without judging folks.
I haven't spent thousands yet on a singular slabbed book.
But I have spent hundreds, and that's my decision.  If you find that problematic, well, then I find THAT problematic.
Don't like it, then don't do it.   Then you can continue to live your life as happily as you wish knowing that's one less problematic problem you have to concern yourself with.

There's also no logic in saving a periodical to be read again later, it was intended to be read and disposed of, yet you hang on to periodicals after you read them don't you, despite that not being their intended use? Periodicals are disposable products so if you use them as intended why aren't you throwing them way after you read them or recycling the paper?

There is no logic in sealing documents that are meant to be read either, but libraries and museums do it all the time. Same with clothes meant to be worn or vessels meant to be drunk out of or eaten off of or weapons intended to be used to kill someone or whatever-at some point things transition from their intended use to become artifacts of a time/era/culture and are preserved as such.

No one hands out something like the actual Declaration of Independence to read or a Guttenberg bible, people use scans/photographs/reproductions of them to read even though the document//book itself was created with the intention of it being read.

Now comics are certainly not in that class of item, but some are making the transition from their original function to a new one.

Not every comic should be slabbed for certain, and I think there might be better preservation methods than slabbing for certain, but I don't get upset when someone wants to use something different from the way I prefer to use it. I have no interest in slabbed books myself, and prefer inexpensive reading copies of material or collections of reproductions myself, but hey to each their own. I don't see someone else slabbing a book or buying a slabbed book as personally pissing in my Cheerios.

Collecting something inevitably leads to people wanting to preserve it. The next step after collecting is conservation, not usage. Once people started collecting comics (and that predates most but not all of us here's first introduction to comics) the logical progression is conservation for commercial purposes.

Not everyone engages with comics as a collector, but not everyone engages with them as reading material either. Nature of the beast once something becomes collected.

-M

This again?

There is nothing wrong with someone having a book slabbed. You can agree or disagree. It is their personal preference. You may not agree but then so what? If it's a book from the Golden Age and there aren't many copies in that condition than yeah I would totally have it slabbed. I can always read it in another form.

I don't understand it when people get all upset and must make ANOTHER thread dealing with stabbing.

It's that's person's choice and I don't see how it's any of your concern what they do with the book.

Hey now! I didn't create a thread about slabbing! I don't even say that word. Ni!