Cartoonist and graphic novelist Chris Ware’s endorsement: “In the predigital days, Quimby’s was the only place to go to find unexpected, surprising, and id-satisfying small-run experimental publications about things that are all now just a click away, from magazines about excessively hirsute women—as owner Steven Svymbersky once described some of his inventory to me—to a zine I bought for my wife, a waitress, about the daily annoyances of restaurant work. Many of these periodicals were the paper-and-staple equivalent of what would come to be known as blogs and now what we generally think of as the internet. Quimby’s continues to be one of the most interesting and unique bookstores in the country and the Midwestern commercial locus of exclusively experimental comics, graphic novels, and zines—if not now its de facto national center.”

1854 W. North Ave., quimbys.com