Around 1986, I visited my sister in Bruxelles. One evening, we visited a young man who was a critic, and who specialiized in bandes dessinées, comics. His rundown nineteenth century student apartment was lined, floor to ceiling, in hard-bound albums, the large format 64-page books that are standard for ‘serious’ Euro-comics. They were all in French, and we were there to drink and argue politics and music, so I didn’t really get a crack at them.

Those old nineteenth-century rooms tend to have high ceilings. So I’m guessing he must have had about sixty-four linear feet of wall, multiplied by six sixteen-inch shelves. call it 3600 linear feet, each quarter-inch a bound book of the post-war European effusion of comics. 14,400 titles.

Occasionally, when my squarebound comics were out and accessible, someone would remark upon them. The clearest recollection I have of these from was a guy who had tagged along into the space with some pals. He was bored as we discussed whatever it was they were there to talk about but i noticed him bending down to the comics shelf and becoming engrossed.

As they left, he turned to me and gestured, saying, “dude, that is the comics collection of a dream.”

Having actually seen something that put my six linear feet of albums into perspective, I demurred.

Spent today running around with Viv. We ate breakfast at the new-to-us Caprice Kitchen, at 80th and 15th in upper Ballard, and enjoyed it. Looks like it might be worth a trip for dinner. Google Street View shows fewer businesses at that corner than there are now, most of which look newish. However it also looks like there was a bar in the process of opening in mid-December which has stalled out, and as we wandered around Ballard I noticed tons of work-stopped condo development sites. Not necessarily a bad thing considering the general fugliness of the majority of the condo-vomit that got tossed up around town between 2002 and 2008, but clear evidence of the local effects of the sudden change in financing.

As it happened we also walked into three small businesses advertising closing sales and walked by a couple more vacant storefronts on Ballard Avenue. We did our bit, though. We bought a new-construction bedframe, in fact, a not-inexpensive proposition.

However the only place we dropped by that was elbows-to-asses at all was the Ballard Goodwill. The place was packed! It’s at 8th and 60th, and as we left I realized how close it was to the old Ballard Playhouse and the bars up there like Reading Gaol. I actually counted a total of SEVEN bars in that two-block strip, and nominate it for future League consideration.