Comic strips into books

The 1970s saw the best period of my enjoying the comic strips that appeared in the magazines my father subscribed.  Aside from those, I also used to borrow or buy comic books from libraries and friends.  Each week, I used to look forward to the magazines being delivered because of my following the comic stories in them.  A huge lot of them had got accumulated by mid 70s.  

I had a lot of time, really a whole lot, at home when I was a student because I was achieving a rare feat!  I must reveal that I took four years to complete the two-year pre-university after my 10th. Got the clue?

But I never wasted that time as I found plenty to do, besides playing street cricket and games.  This post is about how I collected those comic strips from the old magazines and created comic books from a huge lot!  

I arranged all the magazines date-wise, tore out the comic pages and kept in that order.  There were two strips in one page and they had to be separated.

I had a long needle for stitching. Sewing thread was used after waxing it for added strength.  I had seen this being done by the cobbler!  I used 8 strands.  It was tough piercing through the number of pages. So I used a huge sack-stitching needle to make a hole first, striking it with a hammer.  Later I found out the book binders also did that!

It was a helluva lot of work, but I enjoyed doing it because there was no hurry and no academic pressures at all!  I learnt the art of binding books on my own.  The glue was created at home using flour!  Some years later I entirely manufactured a photo album including the hard binding. But that is for another post.  

Phantom strip was so thrilling.  Illustrated weekly of India. 

I used the notebook hard binding for this.

Dennis the Menace was my favourite humour strip.

This binding was got done by my grandfather's book binder who had done many law books for him.

I continued to do this for smaller strips from Deccan Herald, a daily newspaper, collecting esp. 'Blondie'.

Here lies my full collection of books I bound.  The old magazines had to end up in a paper recycling unit.  I'll make a separate post regarding the comics themselves.  So watch out for that!  It will be in "Mysorean Musings".