To this day, I do not own a copy of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #25. Here's why...
A week or so prior to this story, my friend Israel Litwack had picked up a small stack of Steve Ditko-era SPIDER-MAN issues at Bush's Hobbies for what was then (and still would be) an extraordinarily fair price. He'd inherited a large run of AMAZING from a relative, so he was closing in on completing the run.
So a week later, he and I took a trip down to Bush's. And there in the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN section, I found a copy of #25, similarly priced. I don't know if Israel had missed it during his first visit, or if Bush's owner had only just put it out. But it was quite a find. And Israel wasn't too happy.
Tallying up my books of the day, I found that I was a quarter short. And Israel refused to loan me one, since he felt that I was swiping the book out from under him. As we argued, he swore to buy any of the other books in my stack that I might put back, as a sort of retribution. But he offered to loan me even more cash if I would buy something else, and leave the SPIDEY #25 to him.
In the end, being too cowardly to try to haggle with the cashier over the missing quarter, I gave in to Israel's demands, buying WHAT IF...#1 instead. (Frighteningly, it cost a dollar more than that copy of SPIDER-MAN #25!)
This is what a life of hard-bitten comic collecting can do to two friends...
To this day, I do not own a copy of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #25. Here's why... 