Racking up some memories.
So when I opened my store, I had a specific idea for my new comic shelving, a 36-foot long wooden rack (built in 4-foot-wide segments), with the fronts at a slight angle and flat shelves attached with, like, 12 inch gaps between them. It looks a little something…like this:
This photo was very early on…in fact, taken the night before I officially opened my shop for business…so the line of graphic novels and other products on the very top lip of the shelf isn’t there. But you get the idea of how the shelf looks. And it’s served me well for these just about ten years now.
But what he had at my previous place of employment…boy oh boy, what we had. Initially, what my old boss Ralph had were the wire freestanding comic racks, the twenty-pocket style, plus a few wire spinner racks (two of which I now own, one for home and one for the shop). Usually we had those freestanding ones “flattened” down and hanging off of pegboard mounted on the wall. It usually worked okay, though we occasionally had to ask folks “please don’t bend the comics forward on the rack” because, y’know, we were hding the secret good comics behind the ones in the front of each slot.
But eventually, what we ended up using were these, as seen in the September 1985 Bud Plant catalog:
I forget how many of these we used for the new comics…four or five of them, I guess? And we had others elsewhere in the store that we used for graphic novels as well.
Here’s a pic of dubious resolution showing the rack in action, stuffed full of good comics and also Purgatori:
The pricing is…hoo boy:
And that was in 1985 dollars, so those shelves would cost, what, one million dollars apiece now. (I rounded up slightly.) And I don’t think I knew there were two different styles of the plexiglas shelving…we had the “lipped” kind, which is what’s pictured. Just having the plain flat ones would’ve been weird, and possibly a hazard if there were any sharp corners. I mean, I’m presuming there wasn’t.
And here’s something you don’t see every day (or maybe you do, I don’t know what you get up to in your free time):
“Here, build ’em yourself if you’re too cheap to spring on the shipping.” But actually, that’s a good option, given how most comic ships weren’t…exactly swimming in coin of the realm, then as now.
Actually, looking at the pricing, I’m trying to figure out how what I did, having custom shelves built specifically for me, compares to the cost of equivalent Gabriel racks. I think it might have been less oppressive on the ol’ finances buying the Gabriels. Ah well, at least I don’t have to deal with the plexiglas shelves, which, under every day retail wear and tear, would sometimes crack or bust completely. Ah well.
Those racks served the shop well, and I know they continued using them ’til the end, at which point…I’m not sure what happened to them. I presume they were sold to another shop, or just outright discarded. Wish I had the room for them myself…maybe I’d have found a use for them, or maybe I just wanted them around as reminders of the time I spent in that old store.
Boy, those racks take me all the way back to 1987. I can’t remember exactly where I read about them, but I would guess in CBG. My brother was a carpenter, so I only had to order the shelving and best of all it was in the last days of Carol Kalish’s racking rebate, so I got reimbursed for most if not all of it. I had 8 or 9 sections of them and in 14 years, I never had a shelf crack.
I gave a couple sections to customers when I closed in 2001 and the rest went to my sister’s school where they were used in some hydroponic gardening set-up they had.
I still remember my one and only phone call with Carol Kalish before I opened and she was so happy to hear that I had been a retailer at K-Mart for 8 years previously.
I have to say that you have the best comics rack display and the greatest variety of current comics–as well as the cleanest comic book shop– that I have ever seen. Also, you are always playing cool music and I appreciate the fact that it is a true, traditional comics shop–without the incessant din that accompanies other shops full of garrulous gamer geeks.
We got those at some point early on at the shop I was at from 1984-2001. The owner was bitching about the shipping cost a lot. I took a look and pointed out the kit option. I own tools and know how to use them, so I just went to the lumber yard and threw some plywood sheets in the back of the truck and stopped home to get the tools I needed. Took maybe two hours to get everything cut and assembled. We just left them in the back room until the plastic arrived. As with the other John, I don’t remember us ever having any breaks in them. When we closed down, I moved over to the other comic shop in town and convinced him to by those and replace his crappy racks. They then sat in that shop until he closed in 2016. A couple customers bought sections, and I believe we gifted a couple to the local library. The rest ended up going to the dump.
“Here’s a pic of dubious resolution showing the rack in action, stuffed full of good comics and also Purgatori:”
I can recognize How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way & The Official Marvel Try-Out book at the top. BARELY.