Misprint, Misbound, and Redacted Issues

September 20, 2026

I got an intriguing email from reader Brian:

“I am hoping to get some information about a 1973 National Lampoon magazine that I have. In inherited some old magazines and noticed this one has a cover that appears to have been printed upside down so the binding is on the right side and not the left. I tried to do some on line research to see if there are others like this one and could not find any. Any thoughts on whether this might have value as a one off version of the magazine? Attached are a couple of pictures of the magazine. Any insight would be appreciated.”

Here are the photos he sent:

I couldn’t make any sense of this at first. It was bizarre. Given what I know about printing, it seemed like an impossible object. Just as I was about to explore that avenue in my reply, I decided to do a reality check and dig out my own copy of the February 1973 issue.

Here it is, showing the normal cover, inside front cover spread, gatefold opened, and laid out open and face down to show the correct back cover:

My experience working as a magazine designer back in the ’70s and ’80s made me realize I was looking at a bindery error.

Let me explain. After the pages of a magazine are printed (on a huge offset press that can print a “signature” of sixteen pages at a time), the sheets of signatures are fed into bindery machines, which fold, collate, staple, trim, and spit out finished magazines.

What appears to have happened here is that the machine that dealt with the cover was set up incorrectly, causing the entire cover sheet to be shifted one page to the left, cutting off the back cover, putting the front cover on the back, and the first page of a four-page ad inside the cover became the cover.

My guess is that this is a very rare copy of this issue. A big mistake like this would be spotted right away, and it’s probably sheer luck that even this one made it into distribution.

This called to mind a handful of other printing anomalies during the history of National Lampoon that I’ve heard of:

• The June 1975 (“Rainy Day Funbook”) issue has the year 1974 as the cover date, which was corrected during the press run. The error was mainly seen on issues mailed to subscribers.
• Some (maybe most?) copies of the October 1974 (“Pubescence”) issue are missing the “jump” (continuation) of the Editorial because a full-page ad was dropped in in the middle of the press run, replacing that page. More about that here.
• Finally, a page was removed by hand from around half the copies of The Encyclopedia of Humor (1973) because of a lawsuit by Volkswagen over an ad parody. For what it’s worth, the one I bought new back in 1973 had the ad, but I do have at least one copy with the ad removed.

As far as I know, none of these issues sell for more than the other version, probably because most people are unaware of the differences. So it might help to point out the differences if you’re selling one of these.

I honestly don’t know how much an issue like this is worth. Personally, I would value an intact, normal copy of an issue over a misprint. But maybe there are people who collect misprints, like that famous “inverted Jenny” postage stamp.

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