Two weeks ago, Brad Beshaw, the owner of Confounded Books, cut a B, an E, an F, two Gs, three Is, two Ns, three Os, four Ss, a T, and two Us out of cardboard and taped the words "IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" under the store's name on the front window. A 10 to 50 percent off sale, publicized in orange and pink cardboard starbursts, started on April 15 and lasts through this Saturday, April 29, the store's final day of existence. Saturday night, a friend who's promised comic-themed cupcakes is throwing Beshaw a party, and then on Sunday, Beshaw will box up whatever he hasn't sold and donate it to the zine library at Richard Hugo House. Confounded Books' co-tenant Wall of Sound is expanding to fill the whole space.
"I reached the conclusion that continuing was both a financial and physical impossibility," Beshaw wrote in a press release. He has been working at Confounded Books seven days a week while also holding down a part-time job at J&S Fremont News. "With the exception of a sales spike in 2003 when the store moved to its current location on Pine Street, in Capitol Hill, business has been in decline for years." He will now have more time for his own comics and illustration work, and later this year will take his first vacation in 12 years. "I'm going to Hawaii and I'm going to swim with sharks," Beshaw said last Sunday.
He was busy putting baggies of pins, postcards, stickers, and old photos into piles. "I'm going through my junk drawer," he explained. Behind him hung a bunch of original drawings by comic artists, including one of Beshaw himself—the jaw, the tall hair, the cigarette between his lips—by Blankets author Craig Thompson.
The photos he was sorting were of earlier incarnations of his store. Beshaw opened his first, called Wavy Brain, selling comics, books, zines, and videos, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1994. He moved to Seattle and opened a store in Fremont in 1999, then moved it to Belltown in 2001, then to its current location in 2003. Confounded Books sold zines and comics you could not find anywhere else, and paid their creators cash up front for them. (No one else does that.) Beshaw advertised more this last year than ever before, soliciting original ads from artists who've become loyal to the store, but nothing worked. Where has the audience for comics and zines gone? "MySpace," Beshaw said. "That's where zines live now: online. MySpace blogs. That's just my opinion, but I've really noticed that more and more people are coming in and talking about MySpace and saying, 'I love your store. See ya!'" And leaving without buying anything.
Before I left, I bought a booklet of Polaroids taken in Brooklyn, reproduced with a color printer; a 10-page comic about influenza by Ken Boesem called 1918; and hilarious, hipster-themed paper dolls. At that moment, the artist who'd created the paper dolls walked in. Where else could that happen?
