Quimby’s turns 33 on September 15th this year.*
We thought about a number of ways to honor Quimby’s turning 33 that didn’t make it past the brainstorming stage: give everybody an honorary membership to the highest degree of Freemasonry, print a 33(1/3) disc, make some religious jokes, radiate harmoniousness that resonates with the significance of 33 as a Master Number (that’s a choice right? to radiate?) then have a tattoo artist on hand for customers that want to get a tattoo of it on their forehead…There’s definitely a joke in there about 33’s relation to 666, or quite possibly some tricky math about pi. But at the end of the day, we decided to just have a party (and you should join us on 9/21, while we also celebrate Zine Club Chicago’s sixth anniversary here as well. More info about that here).
Recently the owner of the store (Eric Kirsammer) handed me a stack of file folders with some ephemera of the store, and I saw some old notes that were clearly in his handwriting (I mean, I’ve worked here for 23 years — I know everybody’s handwriting by now), but it looked like maybe Eric had sat down with Steven Svymbersky, the founder of the store, when Eric first bought the store from Steven in the 90s. This must have been quite a meeting because notes were taken. In light of our anniversary, see if you can tell what the thing is that struck me from this note:
First, I chuckled at the old school zine itemization (Duplex Planet! Dishwasher! Crap Hound! Film Threat! Like it was a zine grocery list.). And of course, Jack Chick. Jesus, we still carry those.** And I’ve heard Steven talk about Harriet Quimby before (which stands to reason, given Steven’s link to Boston with the “ur Quimby’s” which was called Primal Plunge, that he bought from Michael McInnis). Then my eyes zeroed in on something at the bottom: “33 is magical #” which was rather serendipitous. Our 33rd birthday was mere weeks away from that moment. (Also, the lack of the noun marker “a” was not lost on me, because it always makes people writing shorthand sound like a caveman.)
Also serendipitously, Steven was visiting from NY that week, and I showed the stack of stuff to him. When I showed him this and reminded him we were turning 33 this year, he arched an eyebrow and said, “You know, 33 is a magical number.” He reminded me of some really great stuff, so I present to you, in Steven “Burf Quimby” Svymbersky’s words, the significance of 33 in Quimby’s history. I put it in pink! So you know it’s Steven talking!
“So, the short version of the significance of the number 33 in Quimby’s history is that in the mid to late 1980s when I was publishing the magazine, Quimby’s Quarterly, the preferred beer of the Quimby’s staff (also known as the delinquents I partied with) was Rolling Rock, primarily because it was cheap and came in a nice green bottle. Printed on the inside of the bottle were the words ‘Rolling Rock From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment, as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.’ It was followed, inexplicably, by the number 33. If you look it up, the internet claims the 33 is an acknowledgement of the 33 words in this pledge. We always figured it was a nod to 1933, the year prohibition was repealed.”
“Over time the number 33 seemed to pop up everywhere and it began to take on a mystical quality for us until we began featuring a list of 33s on page 33 of each issue of the magazine.” [Examples below.]
“At one point I also created a chart of the most important 33s.”
“The apotheosis of our inebriated fascination with the number 33 happened in the original Quimby’s store on September 28, 1993, my 33rd birthday, when I hired a band to play the whipping music from Jesus Christ Superstar while my friend, Mistress Bliss, shackled me to the shelves and gave me 33 lashes with her favorite scourge. This was immortalized by the infamous, D.B. Velveeda, which I share with you now because I have no shame.”
“Congratulations on 33 years of selling the most vile, pernicious and twisted publications known to humankind. You all make me so proud!”
So there you have it, straight from the instigator himself, the real rundown of the number in question in relation to this shack of weirdness that we call Quimby’s. If you want to go say hi to Steven in NY, you should definitely visit him at Quimby’s Bookstore NYC, at 536 Metropolitan Ave in Brooklyn. He opened it in 2016, and it is a true oasis of awesome.***
I have both founder Steven and the current owner Eric to thank for holding the legacy of high weirdness in highest regard, a place where I have worked for 2/3 of its life. But I also want to thank all our consignors, the artists who make the zines, comics and books we carry. Without them we would not be the store we are. Thank you for keeping us around for over three decades.
–Liz
*Yes! We’re celebrating our birthday. Just not on the 15th. On the 21st! Info about it here.
**Alternative comics artists love Jack Chick comics. They’re still making new ones. And he’s not even alive any more.
***And if you want to read about some of the early days of the store, Steven compiled some of the material from his early Magalogs and what not into a wonderful saddle stitched volume called Qvimby’s The First Five Years (1991-1996) which we sell in our webstore. Steven told me recently that it would be really awesome to have the energy, means, money and time to do Magalogs again. I agree. We did a bunch of Mini Magalogs in the early to mid 2000s that were folded broadsheets but then the internet got really, you know, intenet-y. At that point, it made more sense for us to sell stuff on our website instead of spending a gazillion dollars on a catalog like it was a Loompanics mail order endeavor or something. But I miss it. I’ll tell you what though. If you come in and request a Mini Magalog when I’m working, I’ll go down into the basement and get you one of our Mini Magalogs we made in the early aughts. Warning though: the font is tiny. Prepare yourself. And I’m pretty sure we still have a some piles of Steven’s old magalogs down there. You’d be surprised what I find when I’m cleaning out down there. That’s another blog post in and of itself.
