Man Of Muscle Mystery

There's a bookstore near our office we refer to as "The Crazy @$$ Bookstore." It's a total, glorious mess. There's a desk in the middle of the store where the owner sits with his cats, barely visible over the piles of paperbacks and haggard hardbacks. Books literally crammed in there from floor to ceiling, with something inexplicably awesome just waiting to be discovered. (One of the better books we ran across in one of our lunch break breeze-throughs was titled I Love People, which is either some sort of sales handbook or a recipe book for cannibals. Not sure which.) I found a bunch of literary mini-magazines titled The Phillistine from the late 19th century there a while back. It's musty, disorganized and cramped.

It's basically an amazing place.

A month or so ago, we got the news that it was closing down. This was rough news to our office, as we regularly would go an peruse the shelves after lunch, scoring weird books on invertebrates and whatnot. The bookstore had fallen on hard times and as a small, eccentric bookstore in a town whose economy was already hurting, well, this prelude to a Recession we've been experiencing coupled with the shift of consumer focus to big chain retailers and the Internet proved too perfect of a storm for this tiny, weird store to weather. Sadness reigned.

There was a big "Going Out Of Business" sale last month at which time I found five (!) Doc Savage (!!) paperbacks (!!!), a 1960's Physics textbook and a copy of sci-fi short story collection titled, incredibly enough, Teenage Super Science Stories. It is as awesome as it sounds.

Well, it's been a month now and the poor guy's still moving out. I'd imagine it will take him at least another one until he's finally all dug out. He's still selling stuff, so we went over after lunch this last week to see what could be seen. I scored a paperback of 1970's Flash Gordon newspaper strip reprints, a Dick And Jane-style writing handbook from the 50's and a copy of Kung Fu, Vol 1: Year Of the Tiger, by Lee Chang, who is apparently the most raddest person who ever walked the earth. ("The most thrilling, action-packed series ever published!" according to the cover, and believe me, it is. You will be hearing more about this. Stay tuned.)

I also bought found this picture, sitting lonely on top of a box of books. I had to bring it home with me. It looked so sad there, all discarded and forgotten and lost. Somebody obviously put a lot of work and love into it - this portrait of their hero - and it deserved a home. I know who it's supposed to be, it had the name carefully scrawled beneath it, but I realized that if I covered it up, it was reeeealy hard to tell who it was supposed to be. Can you guess? Take a look:



Winner gets a mounted color print mailed to them. Lemme know if I need to start giving hints. Good luck!