Tintin Forums

Hello guys,

I'm new to the forum, although I have been a Tintin fan for many years!

I recently purchased two original copies of le Petit Petit Vingtième, a 1931 edition with Tintin in the Congo in very good condition, and a 1936 issue 3 in good condition featuring The Broken Ear.

I won't reveal how much I paid for them, I was just wondering how much they are worth?
They are priceless to me, and I could never consider selling them!

Cheers!

Hi Edward,

Actually not much. The 1931 might go for 30-40 Euros, as they are pretty easy to get. The 1936 might go cheaper.

Price depends on the cover - if it shows Tintin or Snowy, they go for more.

Also check if they are non-massicoté (that is "un-guillotined"): so they have not been part of a large previously bound collection, from which the seller has removed them.

The edges should be ragged; ones with ragged edges are the way they were originally distributed. If they are cleanly cut then most likely they were once bound.

Of course, if you have the complete set of adventures from Le Petit, that'd be a completely different story...

Complete set of adventures? According to my sources, Tintin in the Congo took a whole year in Le Petit Vingtième. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the original magazine ran weekly,so a year of weekly editions is a lot of magazines, just for one story.
But I agree with Jollywagg, the magazines are pretty common if you are going by single editions, not related groups. You are on the right track though, edward.
Possibly, in a few years, those editions will be worth quite a bit. I suggest keeping it in an air-tight bag free of moisture so they retain their condition. Keep it there whenever you are not reading it.

Some people do manage it – as Jollywagg says, bound volumes do come up for sale; sadly, as they also say, they are often bought by speculators, who break them out of the binding and sell them on separately.

I know that the few copies I have were from bound volumes bought at an auction by the couple who sold them to me; however, they are ragged edged, and didn't get punched or re-stitched for the binding process, which was lucky (I presume that they had sprung-spined periodical binders, which kept the issues in place without other forms of adhesion}.


Oh, the first three stories all took over a year, and Congo was actually the shortest of these:
Soviets ran from the 10th of January, 1929, until the 8th of May, 1930;
Congo ran from the 5th of June, 1930, until the 11th of June, 1931; and
America ran from the 3rd of September, 1931, until the 20th of October, 1932.


It's a few, but the tradition of weekly comics is long-standing in Europe, so if it was anything like my childhood, you just stacked them in the bottom of a cupboard, and hoped that your mother didn't clear them out...!

Issues of Le Petit Vingtième weren't actually magazines as such, either.
They were a single sheet (so four pages) of a broad-sheet (as opposed to tabloid) newspaper (the sizes of broad-sheets vary, but imagine something a little bit smaller than A1, and you would be in the ball-park), which the reader folded in two and then in two again, then slit the original fold with a knife, to give an eight-page, roughly A4 sized mini-newspaper, of which only two pages actually had Tintin. So they aren't very substantial – you got about the same page count as a present-day American comic-book per month, without the glossy cover.


Again it should be said that €30–40 is quite a lot of money for eight A4 pages of newsprint – complete copies of some newspapers from the same period can be had for less, as can things like first edition English-language albums in fairly good condition. So they are already quite valuable, by most people's standards!

The prices are always rising too – I bought my ones seven or eight years ago, and I got them for €8–12 each back then.

Thank you for the replies guys, they aren't guillotuined, they are quite a spectacle to behold!
I can keep dreaming about having the entire collection, that would be fantastic...!