
The store was, unsurprisingly, very loosely organized. Old post-it notes that had lost their stickiness and had been stapled back to the bookshelves identified broad categories, but beyond that, it was a crap-shoot. Sociology was next to History, and Psychology was the next aisle over next to Russian Literature. (Not an exaggeration.) Finding anything seems to be a bit of an adventure, and I think that's probably the biggest appeal here.
I was surprised to discover he did have a few shelves of comics material, unlabeled and mixed in with the humor. Very little in the way of mainstream type material you might be searching for, but I found a few interesting nuggets. There were a few DC pocketbook paperbacks from 1978 that I never knew existed; at a buck fifty each, I couldn't pass those up. And I stumbled across a 1992 issue of Psychic Chicago -- Chicago's Psychic Magazine. It had an intriguing cover, and a quick flip-through revealed a four-page comic in the middle of it! I also picked up some Kim Deitch, The Making of a Graphic Novel: The Resonator, and a civil liberties anthology that was NOT put out by the CBLDF.
Absolutely none of those books I picked were ones I was looking for in any capacity. In fact, I was completely unaware that any of them actually existed at all. I bought them in part because they were cheap, but also because there was some thrill of discovering something totally unexpected in a dark and mysertious place. It kind of had an Indiana Jones element to it, honestly. I could have left the books there -- or, for that matter, thrown them anywhere in the building; they wouldn't seem out of place regardless where/how they landed -- but I paid for them as a sort of trophy. I dove headlong into a labyrinth of dusty books on ancient shelves, and emerged having conquered the minotaur. As much as I love the ease and accessibility and universality of Amazon and eBay and the like, yesterday afternoon was quite the literary adventure, and I quite like the idea of being an Indiana Jones of sequential art.
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