Here's one I can't answer and it comes from Ira Matetsky…
Here's an "Ask Me" question that I can welcome your answering if you think it would be of interest to the readers (and if you happen to know the answer).
Beginning in the Golden Age (if not before), most if not all comic books contained a one- or two-page text story. It was formatted as text with minimal if any illustrations. These appeared uniformly enough that there was clearly some external reason for them. Although many of the text stories were uninteresting in themselves, some of them had historical significance (for example, Stan Lee's first published writing). By the Silver Age, most companies transformed the text pages into letter columns, where you in so many others broke into print, as well as "Bullpen Bulletins" or other such things.
I have frequently read that these text pages existed because there was a U.S. Post Office regulation or requirement that a publication must contain some textual (non-comics) content in order to qualify for second-class mailing privileges, without which mailing copies to subscribers would be much more expensive. On its face, this seems plausible enough. We know that post office regulations or practices affected comics in other ways, such as when various E.C. titles were changed as minimally as possible, even when a book was changing contents completely, in an effort to benefit from the same mailing deposit. And outside the realm of comic books, there are plenty of other instances in which the postal regulations affected the format of newspapers and magazines (for example, in the early 1900s, there was a period when newspapers got much lower postal rates than magazines, so there was constant skirmishing over how each category was defined).
However, I've done some poking around and have never been able to locate anywhere the postal officials ever put such a text-page requirement in writing. Do you know whether this requirement ever existed and was documented, or where the first references to it can be found? Is there any record of a comic book being rejected for mailing because it didn’t contain a text page? Or was this just something that publishers assumed might be required, or came from the mind of one postal person and then spread by word of mouth?
Any information would be welcome. And if you don’t happen to know the answer, can you suggest someplace I might ask where someone might?
I'm not an expert on postal regulations but I think it all came down to however the post office defined a "magazine." The rules also seem to have varied from place to place and maybe from time to time. For example, I was told that to qualify for second-class mailing rates, a comic book had to have "other" material in it. An issue of Superman couldn't contain nothing but Superman in it.
DC met this requirement by including little one-page gags, mostly drawn by Henry Boltinoff and those Public Service pages. But Dell at one point had to do things like putting a four-page Gyro Gearloose story in each issue of Uncle Scrooge or a four-page Oswald the Rabbit story in each issue of Woody Woodpecker. I suspect this was a matter of the postal officials with whom DC dealt and the postal officials with whom Dell or Western dealt having different interpretations of the rules.
But I don't know this stuff for sure. So this is a public appeal for anyone with hard info to come forward.
