Rupert Bear Annuals

As all of the grownups that have children will have noticed it’s half term and on behalf of my children here is a children’s book post.
I started by just photographing the Rupert annuals in the bookshop, but was instructed to spread them out a bit, so that people can see the covers.

With older Rupert annuals this is the only coloured bit, so arguably the best bit, and apart from the first one that had a dust wrapper the very early ones have red spines without even part of the picture on them.

I expect many bloggers will be surprised to learn that people collect Rupert annuals and Rupert book collectors cover a large age range as do Rupert annuals.

Some Rupert annuals are expensive and some are not, if they are in nice condition prices start from about £4 and go up to very expensive indeed, but a lot of collectors do swaps with us and don’t use money at all, so that’s alright.

Nice condition is called fine by book collectors, it’s the best condition for books, it means like new and that no one has written their name in the book or cut the price off.

The next condition down is called very good and this means that it isn’t fine, the next one down is called good and that means, not very good.

As this is a children’s post I am going to tell you some of the ways to spot a very expensive Rupert annual without having to remember lots of difficult things.

Some Rupert annuals are worth more than £100 and quite a good way of spotting the more valuable ones is that they don’t have the date on them.

You have to look carefully though as some of the oldest ones were done again, this is called a facsimile and it looks like an old Rupert annual apart from on the very last page where it tells you it isn’t.

Some Rupert annuals had magic painting pictures on some of the pages, when you got these pages wet the pictures went coloured, the ones where the magic paintings haven’t been done are very expensive.

The first Rupert annual was published in 1936 and most of the ones published in the 1940s were published as big floppy paperbacks because of the paper shortage during the war.

Another way of telling the more expensive Rupert annuals is that the covers aren’t shiny.

Now some thoughts about buying Rupert books, first you can’t buy most of them in new bookshops, because they don’t make them anymore, so you might find them at boot fairs or in charity shops.

The main place you will find them is in secondhand bookshops, because Rupert annuals are collectable the older ones and the ones in fine condition probably won’t be out on the shelves, where you can see them.

It is a good idea to ask the shop assistant about collectable books like Rupert annuals, he or she will probably look to see if you have clean hands and if you have dirty hands then they will say they haven’t got any.

Lots of grownups make the big mistake of thinking that the shop assistants like me, in secondhand bookshops want to sell collectable books, it’s a big misunderstanding that causes all sorts of problems.
The people in new bookshops are called sales assistants and I think this is where the misunderstanding came from.