Postscripts
By Clay Smith, Fri., June 11, 1999
Hannibal might seem like the perfect book for FringeWare to sell except for two reasons. FringeWare is closing at the end of the month. "Since we had our bills paid and it was a slow time of year, it would probably be a good time to gracefully bow out," Scot Casey says of the thinking behind closing the store. One of FringeWare's charms is its inventory of gloom & doom titles that bypass the detection of horror novitiates such as myself. "I think people like something that's ... probably less threatening than some place that has Stalin on the wall and a bunch of skulls hanging around," Casey says, though he attributes the store's demise to "the usual reasons cited by independent stores. Basically we never were doing as well as we needed to, you know. We always were breaking even and always seemed to have our head above water, but never enough to do as much as we needed to.
"It seemed, too, as soon as we got rolling, then the Barnes & Noble opened up and the people that used to come up here and buy Bukowski and Burroughs, Kerouac and Salinger just sort of disappeared and we started building another audience with the sort of conspiracy type stuff," though we all know anarchists never have been very organized. And then there's that pesky issue of parking, as in there wasn't any to really speak of. The quarterly FringeWare Review and Web site (http://www.fringeware.com) will still be in existence and Casey says it's not out of the question that FringeWare might "evolve or transform into a space that would be smaller and less overhead." Until June 30, they'll be having a Duck & Cover Sale at the store ...
Don't expect Adventures in Crime & Space to be in its present location forever. Store owner Willie Siros says that the building in which his store is located is up for sale. "Many of the people who are looking at [buying] the building wouldn't mind if we stayed, I mean I would love it if we stayed, but we still have been bouncing against the fact that there's no parking, so I'm trying to find someplace where there's parking," Siros says ...
Congress Avenue Booksellers has new expanded summer hours; they're now open until 8pm Monday through Friday ...
Close to half of Mysteries & More's inventory has been sold in their closeout sale; the rest is available at greatly reduced prices. Call 837-6768 for more information.