I went to college at Gannon University in downtown Erie, and Books Galore was my comics shop during those years...and the year or so after I graduated but before I moved to Columbus. So, between 1995 and 2000, I used to visit pretty much as often as I could.
Books Galore seemed to be a big, old brick house repurposed into a used bookstore with a comic shop in the middle. At one end of the ground floor was a desk and cash register, at the other, racks of new comics, divided into DC, Marvel and every other publisher, with long boxes of back issues between. This area was bordered by bookshelves, and these were lined with used prose books. (There were a few shelves of trade paperback collection and graphic novels just to the right of the counter, but, back then, such books were still something of a rarity).
There was an upstairs, where I think they must have stored more comics and/or books and that was only open for special sales, but I never went up there, so it seemed quite mysterious to me.
The store was just outside the footprint of the Millcreek Mall on Peach Street, a very busy, high-traffic street lined with national chain restaurants and other businesses that were a pull for out-of-towners, and, while I don't know the history, I assume the building had been there for a long time, pre-dating the mall, and that the mall and all the other retail establishments just grew around it.
I don't remember the first time I visited it, although I know the day of my overnight orientation at Gannon, my family stopped there before dropping me off, and I had bought 1993 New Titans Annual #3, the "Bloodlines" crossover introducing "New Blood" Anima. I remember staying in the dorm room that night reading it, instead of going to one of the many horrible icebreaker or mixer activities the orientation consisted of.
The store was just outside the footprint of the Millcreek Mall on Peach Street, a very busy, high-traffic street lined with national chain restaurants and other businesses that were a pull for out-of-towners, and, while I don't know the history, I assume the building had been there for a long time, pre-dating the mall, and that the mall and all the other retail establishments just grew around it.
I don't remember the first time I visited it, although I know the day of my overnight orientation at Gannon, my family stopped there before dropping me off, and I had bought 1993 New Titans Annual #3, the "Bloodlines" crossover introducing "New Blood" Anima. I remember staying in the dorm room that night reading it, instead of going to one of the many horrible icebreaker or mixer activities the orientation consisted of.
This is the store where I used to buy Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA and Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Hitman off the rack. I bought my first manga there, the earlier collections of Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2. I bought the How To Draw DC Comics Super Heroes Book I mentioned on Bluesky recently there. I started reading Peter David's Aquaman via back issues from their long boxes, which I would buy pretty much at random, based on whichever guest-star was on the cover (Superboy, Lobo, Martian Manhunter, Swamp Thing).
Books Galore was about four and a half miles from Gannon's campus. I would usually get there by bicycle, taking side streets to avoid the traffic on Peach Street. More than once I rode in the pouring rain.
I would often bug the people I knew with cars, like my best friend and later roommate Diane or my upperclassmen girlfriend Elaine, to take me there, especially on Thursdays, which was the day I mistakenly thought new comics arrived (I don't know if this was a quirk of when and how they racked their shipments, but it seemed every Thursday I went in, it was full of new comics, as opposed to all of the other days).
When my grandparents would come up to visit, as they occasionally did as the nearest Veteran Affairs hospital to our hometown was actually in Erie, I would ask them to take me there. They were usually only too happy to do so, since Books Galore was on the way to Golden Corral, a buffet-style restaurant they liked to eat at (Erie was full of restaurants that we didn't have in Ashtabula).
When my grandparents would come up to visit, as they occasionally did as the nearest Veteran Affairs hospital to our hometown was actually in Erie, I would ask them to take me there. They were usually only too happy to do so, since Books Galore was on the way to Golden Corral, a buffet-style restaurant they liked to eat at (Erie was full of restaurants that we didn't have in Ashtabula).
When I graduated and moved back to Ashtabula for about nine months or so, I submitted my first and only proposal to a comic book publisher. It was for a miniseries called The Book of Tentacles, in which a goth girl found a copy of a Necronomicon-like book of ancient spells in a used bookstore/comic book shop, with which she summoned a Lovecraftian space god/monster to destroy her hometown, and it was up to her comics nerd classmates to combat it with the help of the bookstore owner and the power of imagination.
I had submitted it to Oni Press, which was then relatively new and seemed to exclusively publish awesome comics, almost all of which I bought as they came out at the time. It was, of course, rejected, but editor Jamie S. Rich included a nice, brief hand-written note, saying that "I think we have enough tentacles with Jenny Finn at the moment!" (Jenny Finn was a two-issue miniseries written by Mike Mignola and drawn by Troy Nixey that has since been republished elsewhere.)
I'm sure Rich and/or whoever else might have looked at the proposal were right to reject it, but at 22 I was more confident and ambitious than I was realistic...by that point, I had also written a terrible, terrible prose novel that I was busily submitting to publishers and collecting rejections for.
The bookshop/comic shop that the series would have revolved around was, of course, based on Books Galore.
Books Galore was not the shop that I bought my first comic books from; that would have been a succession of two shops on or near Main Street in downtown Ashtabula. And it wasn't the shop that I bought the most comics from during the high-point in my comics-buying; that would have been The Laughing Ogre in Columbus. But it was the comic shop I was going to when I really fell in love with the medium.
Books Galore was not the shop that I bought my first comic books from; that would have been a succession of two shops on or near Main Street in downtown Ashtabula. And it wasn't the shop that I bought the most comics from during the high-point in my comics-buying; that would have been The Laughing Ogre in Columbus. But it was the comic shop I was going to when I really fell in love with the medium.
I haven't been there in years, but I'm sorry to think that I will never be able to go there again, and that no one else will...either and maybe miss their opportunity to fall in love with comics.
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Modern media being what it is, I couldn't find a decent article online that either wasn't paywalled or that contained any more information than was in the store's own social media announcement, but here are a few links if you want to learn a little more. It sounds like there will be a notable sale all month, if you're anywhere near Erie.
•Here's the store's website.
•Here's their announcement on Facebook.
•Here's a gallery of photos from the store; it looks like it has changed a little, but not too terribly much, in the last few decades. The gallery definitely gives you a sense of just how jam-packed with books it is.
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