As a 12-year old in 1974 I had the brilliant idea that if I 3-hole punched a bunch of my Spider-Man comics I could put them in a 3-ring binder and it would be easy to read as a longer continuous story.
Yes! My home brewed invention of the Trade Paperback collection!
If you look at the logo Spider-Man just below the price box, or Grizzly’s head in the page-spanning spread, you can see one of the punched holes.
I also cut the Marvel Value Stamp out of several of these issues, if anyone was curious about what that looked like, I’ve included a picture.
Several years later (thankfully before they got too expensive) I rebought new copies of the hole punched issues in my collection. Many years after that (early 2000s) I found the hole punched #137 thru 160 in a box in my garage and sent them off to be bound into a custom hardcover, which I subsequently brought to conventions and got autographed by the main writers of this range of issues, Gerry Conway and Len Wein.
Anyway, I thought it was a cool collection artifact to share from the days when collected editions didn’t exist and reading the comics was more important than preserving them in 9.8 slabs.
http://comicspectrum.com/By Fans who Love Comics For Fans who Love Comics
