Woolworth's and Cheap Paperbacks in the 1970s

Do you remember when Woolie’s used to be the place to go for cheap paperbacks? At a time in the mid 1970s when new paperbacks cost on the region of 30p, cheap paperbacks in Woolworth’s were as little as 9p each, frequently piled high in a jumble, presumably set out by the same store associate who managed the "pick’n’mix" sweet displays. 

The books on sale were generally second-tier publisher American mass-market paperbacks rather than British-published  paperbacks (distinguishable at that time by the former’s coarser paper and less flexible spines), and had obscure publisher names like Award, Star or Tempo. In many cases the edges of the pages were coloured red,or green, or yellow, presumably to help the books stand out in US paperback spinner racks. I assume that Thorpe & Porter or World Distributors were importing these books from the States, in parallel with their imports of comics.

My earliest purchase in this sub-genre was a reprint of the Shadow pulp reprint “Grove of Doom” by Walter Gibson, writing as Maxwell Grant. Tempo had actually published “Grove of Doom” in 1969, but it did not appear in Portsmouth’s main Woolworth until 1972. It was a one-off, presumably inspired by the success of the Bantam Doc Savage reprints, and the Shadow novels published by Belmont in the mid 1960s.

This purchase was quickly followed by some crime stories by pulp era stalwart Frank Gruber (The Laughing Jackass ; Market for Murder),  Belmont/Flamingo reprinting some of his earlier novels from the 1940s. I believe that these were published in 1973. I'm sure the copies I bought were marked down significantly from their 25p cover price.

Although initially these books plundered the pulp back catalogs of Street & Smith and their brethren, by 1974 a major focus of these cheap books quickly became the TV tie-in, along with film tie-ins to certain genre films (Westerns, Crime, Sci-Fi) where a script novelization could be easily commissioned to a good, even well-known, writer in need of a few extra dollars(or quid) to keep the lights on while they labored on their own more respected literary projects.

Of course, there had been earlier tie-in paperbacks sold in the UK in the late 1960s -  the Man From Uncle books published by 4-Square come to mind, as do The Avengers (Steed and Mrs Peel) paperbacks by Panther - but those were full-price, well produced fare which carried a sheen of respectability - unlike the cheap mass-market imports from the States.

These books had latched on to popular culture, and were not going to let it go.

In the days before home video recorders (which started to emerge in the UK around 1976, but did not really go mainstream until 1980) the TV tie-in book was the only way to get a personal copy of your favourite show or film, apart from an audio recording. The appearance of the innovative, but short-lived   “Fotonovel” from Bantam on UK bookshelves in the last week of January 1978 (when Star Trek’s City on The Edge of Forever was published as a series of 300 photos with speech bubbles) marked the beginning of the end of the peak TV tie-in era.

So for a glorious 5 years I avidly sought out these imported gems in parallel to my comic collecting. Looking through past issues of our fanzine SuperStuff, I can relive my interest.

The new book report in SuperStuff #3 (1974-08-11) highlighted the series of books based on the "Mystery Movie" series McCloud and Hec Ramsey. In addition, a reprinting of Beneath The Planet of the Apes by Michael Avallone had just arrived from Bantam. [This book was a must-have for UK “Apes” enthusiasts, as the film itself had been classified “AA” at the cinema, making it unavailable to those of us younger than 14.]

SuperStuff #5 (1975-08-18) reported that I was on the lookout for a copy of Cannon - The Golden Bullet, by Paul Denver. Already five books had been published in that series.

The UK Public’s obsession with the TV cop show in the 1970s, particularly Cannon and Kojak, resulted in nine Kojak books written by Victor Miller and at least nine Cannon books, many of which were written specifically for the UK market by Douglas Enefer writing as Paul Denver, and printed/published first by World Distributors in a look and feel that mirrored US mass-market paperback conventions.

The Cannon books were all original stories, and more books were published in the UK than in the US. Contrastingly, the Kojak books were episode adaptations mostly from Season 1. Only five of the nine books written by Victor Miller were published in the UK. One of note that was omitted for UK publication was Therapy In Dynamite, the novelisation of the BBC-banned episode of Kojak. Incidentally, that episode has never been broadcast by the BBC, even during the repeat run in later years.

UK Edition retitled the novelisation of "Death Is Not A Passing Grade"

Of the film tie-ins by cheap paperbacks, most prominent to me were the adaptations of the Apes movies by likes of Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven and David Gerrold. George Alex Effinger wrote four POTA TV tie-ins.

Joe Millard cornered the Western market with his adaptations of Clint Eastwood’s “Dollar” westerns and followed up with a number of new novels about the Man with No Name.

I’m currently re-acquiring old copies of many of these books, primarily for the nostalgia value. They were very much a feature of the Bronze Age for me….an cool adjunct to it, at least, when cheap publishing reflected popular culture, only to be replaced as the emergence of new technology made the demand obsolete.

I find it interesting that despite the popular success of these paperbacks in the US, that there were no associated comic strips produced in the United States. It was left to the UK to bring the TV cops to the comic page.  We'll dive into that in more detail next time.

© Ian Baker

Batman beyond the Ocean at the End of the Lane – by Ian Baker

South Parade Pier, Southsea, Hants. Sept 1967. © Public Domain

“I wonder what it is about that area. I'd go down the South Parade Pier and return home to my grandparents' bookless house* with comics... 

 

*They had Readers Digests, and a set of Dickens on the bookshelves in the grandfather clock.”

 

Neil Gaiman, Twitter, July 7 2018  

 

For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Portsmouth & Southsea, the South Parade Pier juts out into the Solent, at the southernmost tip of Portsea Island, not so many yards from the short road at the end of the Canoe Lake that in recent years was formally named "The Ocean At The End Of The Lane" in honour of famed writer with local connections, Neil Gaiman.

 

Many of you will already be familiar with South Parade Pier from the role it played in Ken Russell’s film of The Who’s rock opera “Tommy”, when it was significantly damaged by fire on 6^th June 1974 during filming of said film. Never one to waste an opportunity, director Ken Russell incorporated footage of the conflagration into the completed film.

 

However, this was only one of many times during its illustrious lifetime that the pier had burned down, and so despite the glamourous presence in the film of such luminaries as Elton John, Jack Nicholson, Ann Margaret, Roger Daltry and Oliver Reed, "Tommy" is not the subject of today’s blog.

 

Today we go further back to the summer of 1967 and examine the role that South Parade Pier played in shaping our comic collecting lives.

 

As readers may know from experience, seaside towns hold special place in the hearts of UK comic collectors, due to the abundance of back-issues that used to be found in gift shops that only opened during the summer season, when unsold stock from previous years once again saw the light of day, which in many cases included DCs and Marvels from spinner racks of yore.

 

In late 1966 Manchester-based World Distributors (publishers of countless children’s annuals, and sometime distributor of American Marvel comics in Britain) were looking to capitalize further on the Batman TV series craze. They saw a gap in the market that could utilize the skills of their reliable writer Douglas Enefer and talented house artist Walt Howarth, to take advantage of the approaching period when fellow Mancunians, other Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen of all ridings would be heading south with their families for a week or fortnight's break in a guest-house by the seaside. For local hoteliers, the mid-sixties was that watershed moment before the attractions of a cheap week in Benidorm had impinged fully on the British holiday-going consciousness, a time when Wallace-Arnold coaches (or “Wally Trolleys” as they were affectionately known) blocked the main arteries of the British landscape on Saturday afternoons as they bore northerners down congested A-Roads in search of the summer sun of south coast resorts.

 

The photo at the top of this blog, taken on a rather damp 1967 summer’s day, shows two small shops under the front awning of the pier entrance.  In the foreground you’ll see the Lyons Maid Ice Cream concession where many of us bought Zoom’s, Sea Jets and FAB ice creams in the hope of getting a full set of collectors’ cards, while in the background on the opposite side of the pier entrance stands the newsagents/tobacconists which usually stocked American comics.

Better shot of newsagents. © JJ Marshallsay, from Memories of Bygone Portsmouth FB group

But in 1967, the newsagents was also to stock a new bi-weekly series of Batman text novellas (a bit of a stretch to call them pulps, more digests, with covers a little larger than paperback size) which rode the coattails of the Batman ’66 TV craze, published by World Distributors under the World Adventure Library umbrella series title.

Batman Storybook Annual 1967 plus all 11 issues of BATMAN! digest

Aimed at individuals with a short attention span (be it a parent dozing in a deckchair or a child experiencing a candy-floss sugar high), each digest had 64 action-packed pages based on the characters as they were depicted in the Batman TV Series, interspersed with black and white line illustrations. Although records indicate that these digest novellas were published from November 1966 through May 1967, the first of these books that I acquired from South Parade Pier was #9 – “No Quack for the Penguin” – probably at Easter 1967 - and I then went on to track down the previous eight issues plus the two subsequent titles.  

 

I was an avid 7-year old reader. I had already exhausted the extant “Five Find-Outers” books by Enid Blyton, so I was on the lookout for tougher fare. The writer Douglas Enefer delivered the goods. 

 

Take a read of the opening page of #3 – “Batman meets Dr. No-Face” (below). 

If Douglas Enefer was not an ardent disciple of Lester Dent’s “Doc Savage” Master Plot formula, he certainly knew his way around placing the reader immediately into the middle of the action, setting up a scene of suspense and introducing the mystery on page one.  Of course, Douglas Enefer had a strong set of bona fides from the years he spent writing mystery novels and short stories under a variety of pen names (Dale Bogard, John Powers, etc) and well as under his own monicker. His last magnum opus in the 1970s would be to write a series of novels about TV Private Eye Frank Cannon, under the pseudonym Paul Denver. 

Douglas Enefer (1906-1987) had worked in the 1960s as a journalist in the regional British press, then national. In 1967, he joined the Daily Telegraph in Manchester, where he remained until his retirement in 1981. In addition to his journalistic activities, he wrote a few adventure novels and westerns, but above all more than forty detective novels. The adventures of his two heroes almost equally share his police production: Dale Shand, an American private detective residing in London, whose accounts are akin to the noir novel , and Sam Bawtry, an inspector from Liverpool who leads less violent investigations under orders from Chief Superintendent Braxted.

In addition, Enefer wrote novel tie-ins for British and American television series , and also made a few forays into television screenwriting, notably writing in 1966 an episode of The Saint  : The Man Who Liked Lions , season 5, episode 8.

Whether Batman World Adventure Library novella #1 “Batman….And the Ringer!” was Enefer’s first foray into writing Batman stories is open to conjecture. I suspect that he was also the man who wrote all the short stories in the first Batman Storybook Annual 1967, which hit the shelves around September 1966, a couple of months before the digests premiered. The 1967 Batman Storybook annual also introduced the UK Batman Fan Club, where for the princely sum of 5/6d sent to Batman, Heanor, Derbyshire (yup, the real address), a young fan could be inducted into the club and receive instructions on decoding secret messages from the Dynamic Duo.  The World Adventure Library digests then continued to promote the fan club in each and every issue – a shrewd move from World Distributors to keep the Post Office postal orders rolling in. 

Partnering Enefer on the digests was cover artist Walt Howarth (1928-2008), a longtime illustrator for World Distributors Ltd. As the more fully detailed biography in Bear Alley Books blog  details, Howarth's ability to capture a likeness in paint meant that he became WDL's leading artist, producing covers for most of their annuals. He was used to working from photographs of actors and would usually have his covers painted almost a year in advance of publication.

 

However, with the short lead time for the World Adventure Library covers due to the surge in the Batman craze, Walt took the route of painting covers that were “inspired” (ahem) by covers of previously published DC comics, Topps/A&BC trading cards, and promotional artwork developed for the Batman TV show.  Whether permission was sought or given, we may never know, but the works of Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, Sheldon Moldoff, Norman Saunders, Bob Powell and others were certainly plundered to provide bright covers that would jump out from the spinner rack.

Joe Kubert's Cover for Detective #349 repurposed for Batman...and the Ringer #1

 

Swipes from Carmine Infantino, Norm Saunders, Bob Powell and Sheldon Moldoff.

The line artwork inside each issue was fairly rudimentary, and does not appear to have been drawn by Howarth. However, it was certainly drawn by the same artist who contributed the illustrations to the 1967 Batman Storybook Annual.

Co-inciding with the summer holiday crowds returning home and the South Parade Pier shops closing up for the year, Batman stopped transmission on ITV Southern Television with the end of the second season of episodes. It would not be until 1976 that the third season was to be transmitted. World Distributors would not revive the Batman World Adventure series the following summer, although they still published Batman Storybook annuals for the Christmas market for the next three years. Whether Douglas Enefer wrote the stories appearing therein, I do not know.

 

Questions for our readers:

n  Do any of our readers know if Douglas Enefer wrote the Batman Storybook annuals?

n  Who drew the interior artwork of those annuals and the World Adventure Batman digests?

 

More information and references:

 

n  Kid Robson’s blog at https://kidr77.blogspot.com/2016/11/batman-fully-paid-up-member-of-world.html for information on other books in the series.

n  AtomicAvenue.com for covers and US values

n  Artist info from mycomicshop.com

n  UK issue values at https://www.comicpriceguide.co.uk/uk_comic.php?tc=batmanwor

n  Walt Howarth bio at https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2008/03/walt-howarth-1928-2008.html