WHAT A SHOCKING FUTURE...

Over on another blog, the host mentions a comics shop which used to trade under the name of PHOTON BOOKS in Glasgow's Woodlands Road back in the early 1980s.  It later changed its name to FUTURESHOCK and is still trading today, but here's an interesting little bit of background info.

Originally, the shop was run by NEIL CRAIG and BOB SHAW (Neil now runs it by himself), until they had a falling out over matters which I'm not privy to.  Later, Bob opened a shop just along the road from Neil, which, because it sold books (and comics) and developed photographs (that side of the business was run by a fellow called ALAN MITCHELL, I think), went by the name of BOOKS 'N' PHOTOS.

Well, actually, the official names of the two businesses trading from the same premises were SECOND FOUNDATION and SPECIALIST PRINTS, but these titles took second place to the prominence given to what was essentially a bald description of what the shop actually sold - namely, 'books 'n' photos'.  This was purely to wind-up Neil, by using a name as close to Photon Books as possible.

Because I'd once been a signwriter, I was asked to do the sign for above the shop, painted on two plywood boards in the comfort of my own home.  I was really quite proud of it because, although it was hand-painted, it looked for all the world as if it were perspex.  Unfortunately, I only owned a HANIMEX 110mm camera at the time, so the accompanying photos aren't too sharp.  The photo was taken by myself the day the sign was placed above the shop, sometime back in '83 or '84.  Look - you can see Alan, Bob and me in the reflection on the shop window next door.  The other two were taken outside my house before the sign was transported into Glasgow.

I'm not sure it's clear in the photos, but the large white lettering had a thin red outline around it.  Sure takes a steady hand for that sort of detail, I can tell you.

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UPDATE: Sad to hear that Neil died in July 2014.  His shop in Woodlands Road is still there, but not currently trading as far as I know.  Perhaps his widow has plans for it - time will surely tell.

The SIGNIFICANT SEVEN...

I have an interesting (if annoying) capacity to see significance in the most trivial of things.  For example, on my seventh birthday, we moved into a house numbered seventy-seven, in which I had seven birthdays and seven Christmases.  When I started my new school across the road, the first classroom I was in was room seven, and when we moved from that house years later, it was on the seventh month of the seventh year on the fourteenth (two sevens, same as the house number) day.

Something else that has a surreal significance to me is that, many years later, I bought the actual number plate of my old house from the then-current tenant, which has been on the door of my study for what is now well into the twenty-first (three sevens) year.  But that's not so much what impresses me.  What does is the fact that I've now passed that aged number plate many more times since it's been on my study door than I ever did when it adorned the house I once lived in so long ago.

I don't know why, but - to me - that just seems strangely significant.