I used to spend a lot of my life in second-hand book stores…and not just hunting for old comic books. I bought books on old movies, books on popular culture, books on politics and history, fiction by favored authors and sometimes just books that looked interesting if they were cheap enough.
This more or less stopped with the rise of the Internet. I once carried a little list in my wallet of rare books I was seeking and for a long time, I was lucky if I came across one of them every two or three years. I had more or less written the rest off as ungettable until one day, I located and ordered every single one of them via the worldwide web. And that really did happen in one day.
I have rarely been in such a store since, partly because I have been seeking no old books I could not find on eBay and partly because since everyone else buys theirs that way now, such stores have largely disappeared. We're about to lose another. Robert Spina — thank you, Robert — sent me this link to an article about the closing of Book Castle-Movie World out in Burbank. It was the domain of a gent named Steve Edrington and as you'll read, he is closing it after being in that line of endeavor for 51 years.
I don't think I ever even went to Steve's present store but I was in a previous one, at least two decades ago. He remembered me from his first such establishment, Bond Street Books on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood. I was at Bond Street a lot back in the sixties buying old comic books and many non-comic books.
If there's a skill to running that kind of business — and obviously, there is — Steve had it well-mastered. I hope he doesn't regret his decision to close down, though I'm assuming he didn't have a lot of choice. It's sad in a way that there are so few of those places left. True, I haven't supported any of them this century but it's hard to not be nostalgic for something that once upon a time brought you such joy and added value to your life.