As someone who once wrote a Masters dissertation that included an evaluation of the importance of ephemera as social history (in regards to collection development in academic libraries) a project like A Little Book of Comic Shop Price Stickers has an understandably huge appeal. Coming from the direction of Tom Oldham of Dark & Golden Books – those wonderful advocates of the forgotten but important corners of UK comics publishing – it’s a compact but resonant collection of images of those often annoyingly difficult to remove price tags from comic stores, both extant and long since extinct.
Each page of this zine-style offering is dedicated to a different shop and varying examples of their price stickers over the years. Some are full of variations while others house just a couple of different types. There’s a heavy emphasis on London shops which is unsurprising (one can only speculate that some of them at least may have been accrued via Oldham’s position as a mainstay at BF’s fave comic shop Gosh! Comics and through acquisitions in their excellent back issues section) but shops from the Midlands, the North, Scotland, the South Coast and more are all represented.
The ghosts of long gone establishments you may never have heard of here echo as loudly as those that you do recall. A point which Oldham also makes in his introduction. Whole histories encapsulated in a handful of sticky cover attachments that could be the bane of a buyer’s life at the time* but now speak of a community of customers and staff, store ethos, and social interaction. All lost to the mists of time. (*How many times, for example, did I buy a new comic from the Forbidden Planet store in New Oxford Street in the ‘90s only to have a chunk of the cover come off with the sticker when I carefully tried to remove it? And yes the orange ones below look suspiciously like the culprits…)
Some of the entries are foggy on the exact times the stores operated and Oldham asks for feedback and/or corrections in that regard for future editions. This gives A Little Book of Comic Shop Price Stickers something of a wider collaborative vibe in terms of documentation and really has you searching back into the recesses of your memory to consider shops you haven’t thought about in decades, which is another fun aspect of the whole enterprise. The Virgin comics shop in their old megastore in Oxford Street, for example, is vaguely listed as “circa 1990s”. I am fairly sure I remember buying Justice League #1 in there in 1987, that the shop moved to three different spaces within the store over the years, and that latterly it was franchised out and no longer managed in-house. Am I remembering correctly or, decades later, is my mind conflating locations and experiences?
A Little Book of Comic Shop Price Stickers underlines a lack of documentation about the history of comics retail in the UK while evoking some wonderful remembrances too. A lovely little curio that is a gateway into the rich past of UK LCS favourites.
Tom Oldham (E) • Dark & Golden Books, £4.00
Review by Andy Oliver
