The magazine collection discoveries noted below are part of a provenance list page that used to be part of a previous website of mine for selling magazines I no longer have. So any references about magazines being available on that website are no longer valid.
The King Of The Magazines
Last update: 4 August 2011
The vast majority of old magazine collections are in mediocre or worse physical condition. They should be. Magazines, like comic books, paperback books and other types of popular culture items were sold as disposal entertainment. Very few people went to any trouble to preserve these type of items and the ravages of time and neglect have taken a heavy toll on them. Every once in great while however, a collector made a special effort to take care of a particular collection of magazines or comic books or similar collectible. If you’re in the vintage magazine business you sometimes get lucky and find one of these nicely preserved collections which helps compensate for all the junk you have to look at the rest of the time. Below is a list of the high grade magazine collections that I have been fortunate to buy part of. As a collector myself and aspiring king of the magazines, I’ve always found it interesting to know something about the background of where a collectible magazine comes from. Lots of colletors pay good money for vintage magazines and have no idea of their origin.
Sutton Basement
A Playboy magazine dealer friend of mine in Washington D.C., Phil Bills, uncovered this remarkable pure girlie magazine hoard circa 1994. It belonged to a retired Army officer, Mr. Sutton, living in Washington D.C. who bought several hundred magazines from the 1950s onward and apparently didn’t read them. Some of them had rusty staples but the overall condition was Very Fine/Near Mint. My friend got the 1950s Playboy magazines, a long run of Adam and other stuff most of which I bought from him. I also made one trip to Mr. Sutton’s fabulous basement and got the lion’s share of the loot myself, at a cheaper price of .50 each. I told a comic book store manager friend of mine, Bob, about it and Bob said he wanted what I left behind. So we made the drive to D.C. and Bob bought a few hundred remaining magazines at .25 each. I discovered I had missed a few and later had to buy them from Bob at $2.00 each. Ouch! Most of this material I sold at shows and on the internet but the remaining Adams and a few other odds and ends are still available here.
D.C. I
Lightening does strike twice sometimes. Circa 1997 I answered a prosaic for sale ad in The Washington Post that led to this goldmine. A deceased photogprapher in Detroit amassed a huge collection of magazines and art type books. His surviving daughter in Washington D.C. had it shipped to her and wanted to get rid ot if. Another collector beat me to the girlie magazines but he overlooked a nice stash of ultra high grade nudist magazines. I also got a collection of about 200 1950s and 1960s movie magazines and about 600 1960s Men’s Adventure magazines that are still salted away for a rainy day.
Napa Valley
Unless somebody can prove me wrong, the Napa Valley, California find, circa 2000, should be the most spectacular magazine collection in history. A retired postal worker with the usual interest in photography apparently had very little to do besides buy and not read magazines. He only wanted to sell them after their accumulated weight caved in part of the floor of his house. A local antique dealer bought the collection and claims there were about 60,000 magazines in it; mostly movie and girlie magazines but lord only knows what else. The dealer ran an ad in the trade journal Paper Collector’s Marketplace and set off an national buying frenzy. I got a nice hunk of the 1950s and 1960s movie magazines and about 2,000 girlie magazines which as a percentage of the collection was just table crumbs. The bulk of the girlies went to big time dealers and collectors all over the country; I later talked to the owner of Passaic Books in New Jersey who got several of the Parliament style girlie magazines and he said they looked nice. Some of these magazines have varying degrees of water damage, a few with rusty staples, but most of them are unread, glossy, beautiful copies. I sold some of the water damaged magazines on ebay and sold many of the nice copies on my website for a few years but then decided to keep the rest and took them off the website.
Columbia
In February 2003 I got a phone call from a young man in Columbia, Missouri who had just inherited a huge collection of girlie magazines, adult paperbacks, photos and films from a recently deceased uncle (another photographer) who had lived in Wichita, Kansas. I drove 1,000 miles to Columbia and bought as much as I could. Most of what I got has already been sold on the internet but I still have a box of oddball titles and a large run of Modern Man which will eventually be offered here. The collection dates back to at least 1943 and the conditon is exceptional.The uncle obviously read many of his paperbacks but hardly touched his magazines. He put the magazines in paper bags prior to putting the entire collection in storage 17 years ago. The bags and storage boxes kept everything dry, clean and extra glossy. The only defects are occassional slightly rolled spines or light creases along the spines due to the way they were stacked before being put into storage.
Sacramento
In early 2006 I got an email from one of the many people who see my website asking to buy magazines. Most of these leads are a waste of time of course but this one had some juice. A guy in Sacramento, California was cleaning out the usual dead relative’s storeroom and found several mostly Parliament or similar style girlie magazines from the late 1960s through the 1980s. I don’t know much about the collection as I bought everything I wanted through the mail and never spoke with the seller on the phone. I bought about 500 magazines. All the magazines I obtained had obviously not been read. Some had price stickers put on by the dealer who sold them and some had typical scuffing on the covers. But, most of the magazines were in top condition, the way a magazine looks when bought new and just salted away. I just love to find stuff like that. Somehow the seller saw me selling his former magazines on ebay or my website for way more than I paid him which upset him but I guess he couldn’t hold a grudge forever or couldn’t find another buyer for the remainder of the magazines; So oddly enough 5 years later in March 2011 the Sacramento seller emailed me and told me that found more magazines and so I bought about another 100 mostly Parliamnet type magazines and put them on my website.
C.W. Wolfe
In late 2007 I received a phone call from C.R. Wolfe in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who wanted to sell a girlie magazine collection that had been in storage since 1970. C.R. Wolfe had inherited the collection from his father, C.W. Wolfe, who died in 1970. Most calls I get are for collections that start after 1970 so I really enjoy calls about older collections that are no newer than 1970. The collection was about 400 issues of the usual mainstream titles like Modern Man, Sir Knight, Adam. Several of the magazines had minor water damage but overall the collection was in better than average condition with many of the late 1960s magazines mostly being Very Fine. I guess by then Mr. Wolfe was just buying the magazines and not reading them. The highlight of the collection was an additional 250 nudist magazines.. These are always more difficult to find than the mainstream stuff and the nudist magazines were in better condition than the rest of the collection. I was a bit financially disheartened when I found from C.R. Wolfe that I was only buying a tiny part of what his father C.W. had collected. C.W. Wolfe had been a major collector of science fiction pulps and books during his lifetime. He was born in Butler, Missouri (hometown of Robert A. Heinlein) in 1908 and as usual, got hooked on reading Edgar Rice Burroughs novels at an early age. He later corresponded with Burroughs and other famous writers and was friends with author Jack Williamson who also lived in Albuquerque. When Mr. Wolfe died in 1970, his son C.R. donated his father’s collection in 1971 to Eastern New Mexico University which maintains a huge science fiction magazine and book archive which was based on donations by Williamson and other major science fiction writers and fans. Here is a quote from the University’s website about C.W. Wolfe:
“Possibly the largest component of Eastern’s collection came from the estate of Charles W. Wolfe of Albuquerque, again through the influence of Williamson, who had known Wolfe for many years. Wolfe, a field service engineer with Radio Corporation of America,had been a science fiction/fantasy fan since he began reading Tarzan books as a boy. He indulged his enthusiasm with collecting, and throughout his adult lifetime patiently assembled an outstanding group of materials. Wolfe’s collection had no important manuscripts, but included most of the principal magazine titles in long runs, plus early edition sets of established writers in the field. It also included a number of unpublished indexes to several of the Munsey magazines that Wolfe may have compiled himself, in addition to several articles and biographies that he contributed to fanzines. Eastern purchased the collection from his son, Charles Robert Wolfe, in 1971.”
Fortunately, University curators have no interest in tawdry girlie magazine collections, so Mr. Wolfe’s sideline collection stayed safely and obscurely tucked away for another 37 years until his son C.R. decided it was time to sell it in 2007. So, even though nobody can buy any of C.W. Wolfe’s rare and valuable science fiction items, you can console yourself with owning some of his girlie magazines.
Shoreline
Warren Publications magazines like this one were not easy to find in my hometown of Savannah, GA. However each summer my mother drove us kids to Birmingham, Al to visit our grandmother. We always stopped at a restaurant in Slyacauga, AL that had a small magazine rack. That’s where I was pleased to buy my first copy of Vampirella #5. That copy is lost to the ages so this Shoreline copy is a nice replacement.
Many of us in the collectibles business have a practice of frequently checking the internet website for classified ads, Craigslist, to see what is currently available for sale in the various cities across the country. It’s a tedious grind having to look at all the useless junk always being offered but you have to do it because every once in a while you find something like the Shoreline Collection. In March 2008 I was slugging through the Craiglist junkpile when in the Seattle listings I spotted a short, innocuous ad for adult magazines. The ad didn’t say much but it had a tantalizing photo of a box with girlie magazines in it. I could only see the front covers of 2 magazines that were on the top of the magazine stacks in the box, but those 2 magazines were from the 1960s and in surprisingly high grade condition. I contacted the seller and was pleased to discover the box was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The seller was a young man who was cleaning out a house in a small town named Shoreline near Seattle, Washington. The house belonged to his great uncle who was being moved to another home. He was one of those wonderful eccentric packrats who keep magazine dealers like me in business. The uncle’s name was E. C. Deplois. According to his nephew, Mr. Deplois had been a radio operator in the Air Force during the Korean War. He lived many years in Columbus, Ohio alone where he worked for Bell Telecom and the mid 1970s moved to a house in Shoreline where he lived with his mother. Apparently, he didn’t want his mother to know he collected girlie magazines because after arriving in Shoreline, he kept them all packed up and out of sight until 2008 when the nephew found them while cleaning out the house. Mr. Depolis was one of those rare people who either didn’t read the magazines or books he bought or did so very carefully. His entire collection was one of the highest grade, best preserved collections I’ve ever found. I sold a run of 92 issues of Mayfair magazine on ebay that was in lesser condition that the rest of the collection, but I’m keeping everything else for now. I can’t bear to part with it. Here’s a listing of most of what Mr. Deplois had salted away and hidden from his mother all those years. The linked magazine photos underlined below were taken by the nephew in the house in Shoreline:
About 250 various girlie magazines including bondage, adult cinema and other oddball titles as well as more common titles like Adam and a long run of Modern Man .
16 adult paperback books with painted covers.
108 adult paperbacks, mostly long runs of various Greenleaf Classic type titles.
170 issues of Sex To Sexty magazine.
19 issues of Adam Film World.
67 issues of Art Photography 1950s magazines with some Marilyn Monroe, Anta Ekberg and Bettie Page covers.
44 issues of the underground newspaper Screw still in the mailing envelopes.
There were along runs of early issues of the Warren Publishing horror magazines Eerie, Creepy and Vampirella. Also long runs of the hard to find Skywald horror magazines Scream, Nightmare and Psycho. Also lots of the even harder to find horror magazines like Witches Tales.
Mason City
In early 2008 I received an email from Kent Beatty in Mason City, Iowa about some 1950s Playboy magazines he had inherited. He didn’t include photos for me to see the condition so I made a low perfunctory offer based on the assumption the magazines were in the usual mediocre condition. I didn’t hear back from Mr. Beatty and gave it no more thought. A few months later I got another email from Mr. Beatty but this time he included photos of 1940s movie magazines that were in lovely high grade condition. I knew then I made a mistake not chasing the Playboy magazines a little harder. Turns out Mr. Beatty was sitting on a gold mine of paper collectibles. His recently deceased father-in-law had left behind a large collection of movie and girlie magazines and hardcover and paperback books, nearly all in superb unread looking condition. Mr. Beatty had already sold the 1950s Playboys (ouch) and a 1940s set of Paramount Superman bubblegum cards (ouch!) through a local auction company and was going to liquidate the rest of the collection that way if I couldn’t talk him out of it. After lengthy negoitations I made sure we did a deal and I even paid Mr. Beatty to drive the collection to me in August 2008 as I was having trouble finding a cheap enough way to fly out to Mason City and drive it back. Aside possibly from the Napa Valley magazine collection, this Mason City find ranks as the biggest and best condition collection I have ever bought. The original owner was Laverne Scheffel. Mr. Scheffel grew up in Nora Spring, Iowa where as a kid there he worked as an usher in a movie theater. His love for movies was clearly shown in the collection with the hundreds of movie magazines, adult cinema magazines and movie related hardcover books. He spent his adult life working at the Northwestern Cement plant in Mason City. He went by the nickname Ed and some of the magazines have the name Ed written in them. Some of the hardcover books from the 1940s and 1950s are inscribed to him as Laverne by his grandparents. Mr. Scheffel was another of those very few people who took scrupulous care of his books and magazine collection and I was glad to take over custody of it. Thanks Ed, I’ll take good care of it. I listed 452 1980s era adult cinema and other girlie magazines on this website. Below is a list of most of the rest of it. The linked magazine photos underlined below were taken by Mr. Beatty at the old Scheffel home in Mason City.
753 girlie magazines from the 1950s and 1960s.
725 movie magazines from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
801 paperbacks. Many of these are are adult with nice sleazy painted covers. There were also some mystery and a few comic book related.
578 hardcover books with clean nice condition dustjackets. Most of these are 1960s and 1970s movie related but there are several Western genre including Gene Autry, Red Ryder, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger. My own favorite among the hardcover books is a 1949 copy of The Son Of The Phantom.
Bluefield
I doubt this photo of Mr. Buzzo’s was used in The Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
If you want me to rent a van and drive hundreds of miles and pay you thousands of dollars for your magazine collection I might do that. But first you have to send me a photo that looks something like this.
September 2009 was a very lucky month for me. I answered a voicemail message from a Mr. Larry Buzzo in Bluefield, West Virginia and ended up falling into a goldmine. That’s what I like about small town America; it has the most fascinating treasures to give up to the lucky and the diligent. Larry’s parents had passed away and he was selling the family home and all the collectibles his father, Nicola Buzzo, had accumulated. The elder Mr. Buzzo had been an engraver for the local Bluefield Daily Telegraph newspaper. He had an interest in still photography and motion picture photography and had been collecting photography and girlie magazines since the 1930s. Larry told me the girlie magazine collection numbered about 10,000, later revised to about 5,000 over the telephone. After seeing a few photos Larry emailed me I rented a van and drove from Virginia Beach, Virginia over the mountains to the little Appalachian town of Bluefield, West Virginia. As I was walking up the steps with Larry he told me his parents’ house was about 100 years old. It looked that old from the outside sure enough, but it was the inside that I was interested in.
The first room Larry took me to was the room with the boxes full of girlie magazines. The 5000 estimate turned about to be closer to 1500 which was a little disappointing but there was lots more to interesting material to come.
Next Larry showed me a big heavy box of motion picture pressbooks. Pressbooks are large stapled magazine format publications full of articles and advertisements the movie studios mailed out to theater owners. They are difficult to find, especially if they are still complete. The pressbooks were all from the early 1940s up to about 1950. I quickly checked a few and noticed that some were incomplete but I was willing to take a chance that most of them were complete. He accepted my offer for the entire box and we went to next room.
In this room was a large 35mm motion picture theater projector and a wall lined with shelves of hundreds of 16mm film cans dating back at least to the 1940s. For a few seconds I had vision of monetary sugar plums dancing in my head. I was hoping the film cans contained 16mm versions of Hollywood movies, or at least adult stag movies, but no such luck. All the 16mm films were of the Buzzo family vacations and so forth. Nicola Buzzo wasn’t the usual guy who documented his family’s vacations and birthdays with a 8mm film camera. He used 16mm film instead. There is no resale value for family movies so I passed on that wall. The other wall had the paydirt. The shelves were lined with hundreds of photography related magazines from the late 1930s through the 1960s. The highlight of the magazines was the Hollywood cameraman’s trade journal American Cinematographer which is extremely hard to find before the 1960s. Mr. Buzzo’s collection of these went back to 1937. While I was counting up the photography magazines Larry brought me 10 old yellow Kodak film boxes. Each box contained about 60 7″ x 9″ and 8″ x 10″ movie and TV publicity photos. The wonderful surprise here was the photos still had the original studio paper information sheets attached. More paydirt!
Photo still has the NBC info snipe attached.
Apparently Nick Buzzo was in charge of preparing the photos sent by the movie studios to the newspapers for publication and he had been saving them since the early 1950s. In the next 2 rooms the walls were lined with shelves containing thousands of 33 rpm records. I’m not a record dealer but I am a movie fan and I was able to pull out about 150 motion picture soundtrack albums. After several hours of counting and packing magazines I was ready to head back to the hotel I but made one pass at the wall with the photography magazines and pulled out about 35 digest size girlie type photography magazines I had missed before.
I was tired after driving 5 hours and packing magazines for another 5 hours but we still had to load the van. Lucky, Larry had brought along his husky son-in-law to help. It was about midnight and we had to carry the heavy boxes down a narrow flight of stone steps in the dark which was interesting. To make it more interesting, it was also raining. When I got back to the hotel I was wet and weary but as I sat there in my van full of treasure I had that wonderful triumphant feeling that comes from completing a successful mission.
Here is a list of the magazines, pressbooks and photos from the Bluefield Collection.
Motion Picture Pressbooks from the early 1940s to 1950. I sold 283 on ebay, and sold another large stack of incomplete and marginal interest ones to a friend. I kept a few of the best ones for me.
Movie / TV publicity photos. About 600.
American Cinematographer 1937 – 1955. I sold about 247 on ebay and kept some of the best ones for me.
International Photographer about 63 issues from the 1950s.
US Camera about 31 issues from the 1930s and 1940s that I sold on ebay. I kept the 1939 World’s Fair issue.
Art Photography about 53 issues I sold on ebay.
About 35 digest size girlie photography magazines I put on my website.
About 211 girlie magazines all from the publisher of Modern Man magazine; Figure Photography, Yearbook Of Queens, Modern Man Annual. I put the Figure Photography issues on my website and salted away the rest.
About another 1200 girlie magazines. After arriving home I unloaded the van and stacked all the boxes in my garage. When I was going through the girlie magazines I discovered that about 25% of the 1500 total had the top third of the front cover torn off which made them worthless. Magazine sellers were able to send back the top third of the cover for a refund if the magazine didn’t sell in those days. This was a serious setback but I was more than compensated a few days later with another phone call from Larry Buzzo. Larry told me he found 75 more of those yellow Kodak film boxes that he would mail me. So these 4500 extra publicity photos more than made up for the damaged magazines. I kept about 300 of the best photos for me and sold the rest on ebay. He also had found 39 presskits from the 1960s. Presskits are a brochure with photos and information sheets about the movie. They replaced the older pressbook format sometime in the 1960s.
The Bluefield collection is not generally high grade by condition. Most of the American Cinematographer and other movie photo magazines were in better than average condition but not in top condition. Many of the girlie magazines were in the Fine / Very Fine range, not Near Mint. The pressbooks were mostly average condition due to their age. Therefore I didn’t annotate the girlie magazines on my website as from Bluefield except for the digest photo magazines and the Figure Photography magazines that were Very Fine / Near Mint. However because of the large amount of exceptionally rare movie pressbooks, publicity photos and photography magazines in addition to the girlie magazines, I consider the Bluefield collection to be one of my favorite discoveries.
DC II
The D.C. II Collection was a collection of magazines I bought from a lady in Washington, D.C. in October 2010. Her parents had collected a wider and more interesting variety of magazines than normally found. They were mostly movie and television and Men’s Adventure magazines mostly from 1945 to 1955 but with a few girlie magazines also. There were about 700 regular size magazines. One of the girlie magazine titles like Sir which went back to the early 1940s and I had never found them that old before. There were several oversize magazines like Peep Show, Paris Life, Glance, See, Click and so on. There were also several digest magazines like Photo, Pic, Eye and some Humorama digest cartoon magazines. Among the digest magazines were 54 issues of TV Guide in nice shape without mailing labels. TV Guide is one of the hardest magazines to find in nice shape and I had never had a chance to buy any old nice ones like these before.
The most expensive magazines were a few copies of the rare EC Picto-Fiction magazine Shock Illustrated. One of the highlights of the collection were several detective magazines with the lurid painted girlie covers like Police Detective.
I sold most of the oversize and digest magazines on ebay and kept all the regular size magazines. I haven’t put any of the regular size magazines on my website but I did list several digest cartoon magazines and oversize magazines on my website.
The condition of the magazines was easily Very Fine with many being Near Mint with nice cover gloss and off-white to white pages. Many of the older magazines on cheap pulp paper did have the usual mild fading and edge tanning.
Greenbrier
In March 2011 I was performing the routine, dreary task of looking through the listings on Craigslist for magazine leads. In the listings for Nashville, Tennessee I found a listing by a man claiming to have lots of adult magazines for sale. I sent him an email and the seller replied that he had about 14,000 magazines. He lived in the small town of Greenbrier north of Nashville. As I said above regarding the Bluefield, West Virginia collection, small town America does have it treasures to be found. By 2011 I had been in the collectible magazine business for 15 years and had never found this many magazines available to buy.
I rented a van and drove out to Greenbrier. After driving all day I arrived in Greenbrier late at night. The seller, Glen Solomon, met me at my hotel and drove me out to his house. The magazines were in a large outbuilding. A few minutes after looking over the magazines I knew I had found the best deal in my career. There really were about 14,000 magazines. Glen hadn’t exaggerated like many sellers do. They were all in plastic bags and overall the condition was better than average. The dates ranged mostly from the 1960s up to about 2005. There was a large variety of the normal newsstand type magazines and some more esoteric harder to find titles as well. Luckily, the original owner had been a “big boob” collector and there was a heavy emphasis on Gent, BUF Swinger, Gem, Kingsizeand those type of magazines. Another lucky break was that the post 1975 magazines were mostly those big boob types and not the usual junk like Penthouse, Gallery, Oui, Hustler and all those other useless modern titles. For me the highlight of the collection was a large 30 year run of the best big boob title, Fling. Fling seems to have had spotty distribution and I had never found a large number of them before. There were also a few hundred of the better nudist magazines.
I asked Glen about the origin of the magazines and he said his brother who collected them had passed away recently. When Glen went out to his brother’s house he found several locked metal storage cabinets all packed with the magazines. Glen was his brother’s estate executor and he was eager to get rid of the magazines. He said he had no idea his brother had been collecting them all these years. I’ve heard lots of stories of deceased men hiding their girlie magazine collection from their wives but I had never heard of a case of man not telling his brother.
I asked Glen how many magazines he had already sold and he said one local guy had bought 1,000 hardcore magazines and local Jayne Mansfield, Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe collectors and cherry picked a few magazines. I thought to myself those guys weren’t very good cherry pickers to leave behind the Fling and nudist magazines which always bring good money. Glen also said a number of out of state dealers were interested but it was the usual story that the dealers wanted Glen to drive the magazines to them since they were to lazy to come and get them. I always like raiding into the territory of other magazine dealers and scooping magazine collections out from under their lazy noses.
I bought close to 2,000 magazines and told Glen I would be back in 2 weeks to get the rest. While I was home trying to raise the money for the rest of the magazines I ordered 50 magazine boxes from my usual source, Bags Unlimited, and had them mailed to Glen so he could finish the boxing chores. I flew out to Nashville. Glen met me at the airport drove me to the truck rental place. We loaded up the rest of the magazines in the truck and I drove the last 12,000 magazines home. I packed the first batch of 2,000 with Glen in a hurry and he packed all the second batch of 12,000 so I only have a general idea of what I have. I anticipate some fun finding the “ringers” and magazines I’ve never seen before as I sell them off on ebay and my website over the next several years.
Very informative and interesting for magazine collectors and historians.
Wow! Those are some amazing stories. As I recall, Napa Valley collection also had a lot of men’s adventure magazines that were bought by Heartwood Books & Art.
Bob – Heartwood Books had 2 or 3 Men’s Adventure magazines from Napa Valley like “Male” or “Stag” from the 1960s at Pulpfest 4 years ago. The price was $75 each which I thought was way to high for those type of magazines even in high grade condition. However today looking on ebay less than top condition Men’s Adventure magazines are bringing close to $75 each in some cases. I’m sure the rarer “Nazi torture” type covers would bring more.
I spoke with the owner of Heartwood several years ago when we were both buying Napa Valley magazines from the same seller who found the collection. He said the Napa Valley seller was shipping him a pallet loaded with boxes of girlie magazines. I’ve never seen Napa Valley girlie magazines at Pulpfest or anywhere else for sale so maybe the Heartwood guy is still sitting on them. I sold about 1/3 of my Napa Valley girlie magazines on ebay several years ago but I still have the rest amounting to a few hundred issues.