Memorable Times. Memorable Objects.
Rare comics and cultural artifacts. Chosen with care. Sold with conviction.
Featured ComiCS
The first two issues introduced them. This is the one where they became themselves. Issue three is when the Fantastic Four put on their costumes, moved into the Baxter Building, unveiled the Fantasti-Car, and declared to the world — and to readers — that something genuinely new had arrived in comics.
Currently #31 on Overstreet’s Top 50 Silver Age Comics list, FF #3 is a foundational key that tends to get overlooked in the shadow of issue one. It shouldn’t be. This is the issue that established the visual and structural identity of the team that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would build a universe around.
Certified by CGC at 6.5 Fine+ — a clean, presentable mid-grade copy of a 1962 book. With Avengers: Doomsday arriving in December 2026 and the FF at the center of it, the timing for a book like this is only going one direction.
DETAILS
Issue Fantastic Four #3 · Marvel Comics · March 1962
Key 1st appearance of the Fantastic Four in costume
Also features 1st appearance of the Fantasti-Car MK I and the Baxter Building
Also features 1st appearance of Miracle Man
Credits Cover and art: Jack Kirby · Story: Stan Lee
Grade. CGC 6.5 Fine+
Ranking #31 on Overstreet’s Top 50 Silver Age Comics
Marvel’s Space-Born Super-Hero.
By the spring of 1968, Marvel had a problem worth having: too many heroes and not enough titles. Mar-Vell, the Kree warrior who first appeared in Marvel Super-Heroes #12, had earned his own book — and Captain Marvel #1 is where the cosmic corner of the Marvel Universe began to take its modern shape.
Gene Colan drew him lean and strange, more astronaut than strongman, floating in a green-and-white suit against Colletta’s inky starfields. Roy Thomas wrote him as a soldier caught between duty and conscience — an alien learning, reluctantly, to care about the planet he was sent to surveil. It’s a first issue that reads like a threshold, and everything from the Kree-Skrull War to the character’s later cosmic reinventions traces back through this book.
This copy is graded CGC 9.2 with White Pages — a genuinely high grade for a newsstand book approaching sixty years old. The cover shows the crisp register and saturated color the grade implies, and retains its original period date stamp: a small, honest mark of where and when it once sat on a rack. Housed in an older CGC holder.
CGC 9.2 · White Pages · Marvel Comics, May 1968.
Eighty years ago, DC Comics asked a question on the cover of this issue: are two villains better than one? The answer, as any Batman reader could tell you, is emphatically yes.
Batman #25 contains the only Golden Age team-up of the Joker and the Penguin — the two most iconic villains in Batman’s rogues’ gallery, together for the first and only time in the Golden Age of comics. Jack Burnley and Jerry Robinson handled the interior art, and Dick Sprang — one of the defining Batman artists of the era — delivered the cover. The result is a book that reads as a historical artifact and a genuinely great piece of Golden Age storytelling.
White pages in a 1944 book are exceptional. This CGC 4.0 is a sturdy, well-preserved Very Good copy — honest grade for a book that is over eighty years old and surviving remarkably well. An essential piece for any serious Golden Age or Batman collection.
In the summer of 1959, Otto Binder and Al Plastino did something the editors of Action Comics had quietly been building toward for years: they gave Superman a family. Action Comics #252 introduces Kara Zor-El — Supergirl — in a story that hits every note a first appearance should: origin, pathos, wonder, and a dramatic full-cover reveal that left readers no doubt a new character had arrived to stay.
The story is deceptively compact. In seven pages, Binder establishes Argo City's miraculous post-Krypton survival, Zor-El's desperate gamble to save his daughter, and Kara's arrival on Earth with powers equal to her famous cousin's. Plastino's art is warm and accessible in the way only late-'50s DC could manage — clean, bright, enormously readable. The cover, penciled by Curt Swan with inks by Al Plastino, frames the meeting of the two cousins against Kara's crashed rocket with a dramatic simplicity that became one of the era's most reproduced images.
Sixty-seven years later, with Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow arriving on June 26, 2026, this is the book everyone is looking for. Action Comics #252 is currently ranked #16 on Overstreet's Top 50 Silver Age Comics, and surviving mid-grade copies are genuinely scarce — this was a heavily circulated newsstand title in an era before protective bags and boards were standard practice.
This copy grades CGC 5.0 (Very Good/Fine) with Cream to Off-White pages. It presents solidly for the grade — a real, holdable, readable piece of Silver Age history with a third-party grade to anchor the transaction.
Featured BOOKS
Some debuts announce a career; this one announced a movement. When W. W. Norton published Walter Mosley’s first novel in 1990, the American crime tradition had been waiting decades for the book without knowing it. Easy Rawlins — Black, broke, recently fired, in possession of a small house he cannot afford to lose — walks into a job offered by a man named DeWitt Albright, and walks the reader into a Los Angeles that the genre’s white masters had been writing around for half a century.
The Norton first edition is the artifact of that arrival. The jacket photography, the typesetting, the period-appropriate trim — all of it speaks to the moment Mosley landed: a literary debut from a press not normally associated with genre fiction, presented seriously, given its full weight. This copy retains the dust jacket in near-fine condition with the original $18.95 price unclipped. For collectors of postwar African American literature, of the modern detective novel, or of significant American debuts, the 1990 Norton first is the place to begin.
Condition: Fine in near-fine dust jacket. Boards tight and square, no shelf wear. Dust jacket clean and unclipped — original $18.95 price retained. Interior clean and unmarked; no inscriptions or bookplates. Stated First Edition with full number line to 1. ISBN 0-393-02854-2.
The Bauhaus lasted fourteen years. Its influence has lasted a century and counting.
Founded in Weimar in 1919, dissolved under Nazi pressure in 1933, the school produced a body of work in furniture, typography, weaving, photography, theater, and industrial design that quietly reorganized how the modern world looks. This is the catalogue from MoMA's landmark 2009 retrospective — edited by Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman — and it remains the standard scholarly account of the Bauhaus in English. Not a coffee-table overview but a serious reckoning: workshop by workshop, teacher by teacher, with full-color plates throughout and essays by a team of international scholars.
Condition: Excellent. Clean boards, tight spine, pages fresh and unmarked.
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Editors: Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman.
Published in 1982 by Abbeville Press in collaboration with Walt Disney Productions, Treasures of Disney Animation Art is the kind of book that reminds you why the golden age of Disney deserved to be called golden.
This large-format volume draws directly from the Disney archives: production drawings, concept sketches, color models, layout art, and background paintings from the full sweep of the studio’s classic output. Snow White. Pinocchio. Fantasia. Dumbo. Bambi. Cinderella. Alice in Wonderland. Peter Pan. The art reproduced here was never meant to be seen by the public — it was working material, created by animators at the height of their craft before being locked away in studio vaults.
Edited by Walton Rawls and designed by Howard Morris, the book is itself a beautiful object: large enough to do justice to the originals, printed with enough fidelity to appreciate the pencil strokes and color choices that went into every frame.
This is a first edition (third printing), published the year the Disney archives first opened their doors to this kind of scholarly treatment. A foundational reference for anyone serious about animation history or Disney collecting.
This copy shows wear to the spine; interior pages are clean throughout.
Featured ARTIFACTS
The Cure for the Modern Navy
It arrives looking like a patriot’s keepsake. The cover is all rope-knot borders and steaming battleships, a lookout perched in his fighting-top while the fleet churns past in line astern. Open it expecting the pride of the new American steel navy — the Kearsarge, the Kentucky, the great twenty-thousand-ton dreadnoughts then rising in the yards — and you will find exactly that. You will also find, three pages on, detailed instructions for curing a morphine habit.
This is the small, marvelous deception of the patent-medicine premium. The Dr. Miles Medical Company of Elkhart, Indiana did not publish this booklet to celebrate the Navy. They published it so that a man waiting at the druggist’s counter — in this case the counter of H.A. Blackmer, on Purchase Street in New Bedford — would take it home, admire the warships, and absorb, between the halftones, the gospel of Nervine. “The Nerves are the Life of the Body,” one spread insists beside an anatomical figure wired like a telephone exchange. Another assures the sufferer of “locomotor ataxia” that relief is at hand. A third, the strangest and best of all, lays out a calm domestic protocol for breaking free of the drug habit — hot baths, a blanket, a quart bottle of diminishing morphine — underwritten, naturally, by Dr. Miles’ own remedies.
It is a document of its precise moment: the years just before the Pure Food and Drug Act would force the quack empires to account for what was in the bottle. The Navy it describes is equally of that moment — the Great White Fleet steaming toward its circumnavigation, the country newly convinced of its place among the sea powers. Two American confidences, naval and pharmaceutical, bound together in a single throwaway pamphlet that somehow was not thrown away.
The back wrapper keeps the human trace: a portrait of one Ward L. Goding of Durmid, Virginia, “severe heart trouble relieved with Dr. Miles’ Heart Cure,” and below him the compliments of the New Bedford druggist who handed the booklet across his counter more than a century ago.
Condition & honest notes: This is a survivor, and it wears its survival plainly. There is chipping and short tearing to the edges, a torn corner across two of the Navy leaves, missing paper at the lower edge of some pages, and the toning and soiling that a hundred years of newsprint earns honestly. The color wrappers remain bright and whole, and every page of text reads clean. We offer it as what it is — a genuine, well-traveled artifact of American advertising, not a pristine specimen, and priced as such.
Format: Softcover advertising booklet, chromolithographed color wrappers, approx. 32 pages. Dr. Miles Medical Co., c. 1907–1909. Distributed by H.A. Blackmer, New Bedford, Mass.
Before there was a Cat in a Hat, there was a Chief on a wagon.
In the years around 1940, a young Theodor Geisel — still building a living in commercial illustration, still a decade from the picture books that would make “Dr. Seuss” a household name — took a job that would have seemed unremarkable at the time: advertising work for the Narragansett Brewing Company of Rhode Island. The brewery’s mascot was Chief Gansett, and Geisel set him loose. On this 12-inch lithographed tin tray, the Chief tears across the surface on a little wagon, a foaming glass held impossibly aloft, a wide-eyed cat scrambling in his wake. “Gangway for Gansett!” the lettering shouts. “Too Good to Miss!” yelps the cat. And there, lower right, the signature that turns a beer tray into something more: Dr. Seuss.
The line work is unmistakably his — the rubbery motion, the gleeful absurdity, the animal sidekick stealing the corner of the frame. You can see the picture-book artist forming inside the ad man.
We believe this to be an original example, manufactured by American Art Works of Coshocton, Ohio — the firm documented as the maker of the period original. Everything we can examine supports it: the full 12-inch diameter, the coarse offset-lithography dot screen visible under magnification, the formed-and-rolled steel rim, and a reverse that carries no modern copyright or importer marks — only the oxidation and fine craquelure of real age. We stop short of calling it certified; we have not submitted it to a breweriana authentication specialist, and we would rather you have our honest read than our marketing.
Its condition is the condition of an object that lived. The front is bright and complete, the colors still singing, with only light surface wear. The red rim carries several enamel chips where eight decades of handling wore through to the metal. The back is oxidized and crackled. None of this is hidden, and none of it should be: this was a working tray, made to carry glasses in taprooms and kitchens, not to sit untouched under glass. The wear is not damage to apologize for. It is the provenance.
A word, plainly, about the image. Chief Gansett is a period Indigenous caricature — the kind of mascot mid-century American advertising deployed without a second thought. We don’t scrub that from the record or soften it. The tray belongs to a real and complicated moment: the early commercial career of one of the century’s most beloved illustrators, the golden age of New England brewing, and the era’s casual, now-uncomfortable use of stereotyped imagery. A serious collector deserves the whole picture, not a flattering crop of it.
A hero of early Seuss, a relic of Rhode Island, and a genuinely charming object. Gangway.
Original World War II U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve recruiting poster, “Be a Marine, Free a Marine to Fight,” 1943. Distributed by the Office of War Information for the U.S. Marine Corps (distribution line printed in the lower margin). Printed by McCandlish Litho Corporation, Philadelphia. Small format, 14 × 20 inches.
A uniformed Women’s Reserve Marine, clipboard in hand, inspects an aircraft, modeled by Veronica Byrnes Bradley (1923-2018), a real WR who repaired planes in California before discovering her own likeness had become the campaign. “Free a Marine to Fight” was among the most effective recruiting slogans of the war, out-pulling the WAC, WAVES, and SPARS campaigns; nearly 19,000 women answered it.
Color lithograph on paper. Vertical and horizontal fold lines present as issued, consistent with wartime distribution, normal and expected for this format. [CONDITION - PLEASE CONFIRM IN HAND: even, light age-toning; strong color retention; no tears or losses observed in photos; frame shows light shelf wear.] Housed in a black metal frame with wire hanger (see reverse photos). Believed original wartime printing based on the OWI/USMC distribution line.
About the Memory Shop
I've spent more than fifty years collecting artifacts of the stories, characters, and worlds that inspire me — comics, science fiction, film, television, genre fiction, games, toys, and more. What began as wonder became fascination, which then became a lifelong pursuit.
The Memory Shop of Concord is the result of that lifelong engagement — a place where every object is chosen for what it means, not just what it's worth.
These are things that once sparked imagination. And still can.