Before the comic shop, before the convention hall, there was the Better Little Book — a fat little hardcover, small enough for a coat pocket, that delivered the newspaper-strip heroes of the 1930s and ’40s straight into the hands of the kids who would grow up to build comic fandom itself.
This is one of them: Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, Better Little Book #1407, printed by Whitman of Racine, Wisconsin in 1946. Adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs, its 300-odd pages of line art reprint Rex Maxon’s daily Tarzan strips — a flip-book jungle, page after page of the ape-man at full stride.
The cover has held its color across nearly eighty years: Tarzan and the lion, mid-chase, still vivid. The spine is whole and upright, every word legible — the way a book looks when it was read and kept rather than read and discarded. There is honest wear at the corners, the soft white showing through where small hands held it. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
This copy comes from the collection of Ken Donnell — and that is where its story deepens. I knew Ken when I was a teen. He was a Houston collector from the early Texas fandom scene of the late 1960s and ’70s, the circle that gathered around Roy’s Memory Shop — the Houston institution this very store is named in tribute to. Ken was the real thing. Houston fandom still tells of the night he paid a hundred dollars for a Batman #1, back when a hundred dollars for a comic was unthinkable. I saw part of his collection myself as a teenager, including his Detective Comics #27 through #40 bound into a single volume — the first appearance of Batman, kept like scripture.
That is the shelf this little Tarzan came from. Not the rarest book Ken owned — but a book owned, and kept, by someone who loved his heroes. A few years ago I acquired it directly from his collection.
Good+ condition. Bright, intact cover; complete, straight, fully legible spine; edge and corner wear with some paper loss to the tips; light chipping and a small stain to the rear cover; uniform page toning. Complete, with no tape and no restoration. Ships with signed provenance documentation.
Before the comic shop, before the convention hall, there was the Better Little Book — a fat little hardcover, small enough for a coat pocket, that delivered the newspaper-strip heroes of the 1930s and ’40s straight into the hands of the kids who would grow up to build comic fandom itself.
This is one of them: Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, Better Little Book #1407, printed by Whitman of Racine, Wisconsin in 1946. Adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs, its 300-odd pages of line art reprint Rex Maxon’s daily Tarzan strips — a flip-book jungle, page after page of the ape-man at full stride.
The cover has held its color across nearly eighty years: Tarzan and the lion, mid-chase, still vivid. The spine is whole and upright, every word legible — the way a book looks when it was read and kept rather than read and discarded. There is honest wear at the corners, the soft white showing through where small hands held it. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
This copy comes from the collection of Ken Donnell — and that is where its story deepens. I knew Ken when I was a teen. He was a Houston collector from the early Texas fandom scene of the late 1960s and ’70s, the circle that gathered around Roy’s Memory Shop — the Houston institution this very store is named in tribute to. Ken was the real thing. Houston fandom still tells of the night he paid a hundred dollars for a Batman #1, back when a hundred dollars for a comic was unthinkable. I saw part of his collection myself as a teenager, including his Detective Comics #27 through #40 bound into a single volume — the first appearance of Batman, kept like scripture.
That is the shelf this little Tarzan came from. Not the rarest book Ken owned — but a book owned, and kept, by someone who loved his heroes. A few years ago I acquired it directly from his collection.
Good+ condition. Bright, intact cover; complete, straight, fully legible spine; edge and corner wear with some paper loss to the tips; light chipping and a small stain to the rear cover; uniform page toning. Complete, with no tape and no restoration. Ships with signed provenance documentation.
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