BEFORE you mention it in Comments, Forbidden Planet, the sci-fi and comic shop on #832 Broadway, is hardly Forgotten as it attracts perhaps a million shoppers and visitors per year. However, it’s a big part of my youth and I feel it’s worth a mention. When I was working nights at Photo-Lettering, NYC’s biggest typesetter, between 1982 and 1988, Fridays once per month was a special day. Before my shift began at 5 or 7 PM, I would hit Manhattan early and make my way to the then-vast Forbidden Planet and then get something to eat.
For me it was a special place, a vast storefront on the corner of Broadway and East 12th directly opposite the Strand bookshop. (The Strand is much beloved by book aficionados, but I never warmed up to it, as I always found it haphazardly arranged.) However, Forbidden Planet, named for the 1953 science fiction film with Leslie Nielsen in his pre-comedy Frank Drebin days, also had a vast collection of sci-fi books, memorabilia and collectibles. Not only did I pick up the latest DC titles from the week (I was not a big Marvel man, sorry Jack Kirby and Stan Lee) but my favorite sci-fi writers such as Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury were having new reprints released and I collected all of them. I was also a big sci-fi review and analysis fan, so not only did I get fiction by Brian Aldiss and Stephen King, I also bought their nonfiction review volumes such as King’s Danse Macabre, which I am rereading right now. It was there I purchased The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree, the cover of which was typeset at Photo-Lettering and I had a hand in its production.
Arkham House was reprinting much of H.P. Lovecraft at the time, with new notes by his greatest critic and analyzer S.T. Joshi; the Planet carried all of them. It also carried the Lovecraft “fanzines” Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu, and I still have them in a closet at Forgotten NY headquarters. I rarely throw out books, so I still own much material purchased at Forbidden Planet all those years ago. I remember the creaky wooden floors and the multiple fans during the summer; it wasn’t air conditioned. Forbidden Planet was the highlight of the month, and I’m glad it’s still around, albeit in a smaller space. Forbidden Planet is also a chain of sci-fi stores in the UK and Ireland, but the New York store is run independently.
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6/28/23