{"id":364,"date":"2009-03-27T02:23:51","date_gmt":"2009-03-27T07:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=364"},"modified":"2017-07-10T23:41:25","modified_gmt":"2017-07-11T03:41:25","slug":"aliens-alibis-capitol-centre-mid-2000s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=364","title":{"rendered":"Aliens & Alibis, Capitol Centre: Mid 2000s"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I can't quite recall which storefront in the now largely defunct Capitol Centre<\/i> plaza behind Columbia Mall<\/i> housed Aliens & Alibis<\/i>, but it was one of the ones pictured here.<\/p>\n

Aliens & Alibis<\/i> was the right store at the wrong time. It was a book store which as the name suggested, concentrated on science fiction and mysteries, something I would have been all over in the 70s or 80s. In the event, I think I went there twice. They had some nicely offbeat SF and mystery books -- things like art books of classic pulp covers and small press editions of classic authors -- stuff that wouldn't show up at Waldenbooks.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, they started not in the 70s or 80s, but in the 00s, and the market had completely changed. First, Waldenbooks<\/i> and The Happy Bookseller<\/a> were no longer the main in-town competition. Both of those stores were relatively small spaces and simply couldn't stock obscure genre books in depth. That wasn't true, though, for big-box booksellers like Barnes & Noble<\/i> or Books-A-Million<\/i>. Second, there was The Internet and the Amazon.com juggernaut. Now virtually any<\/i> obscure small-press reprint or obscure new book by your favorite (though bottom list) author was available with a mouse click and suddenly the only thing a store like Aliens & Alibis<\/i> had going for it was the serendipity factor -- going in and seeing something you didn't know existed, and that just wasn't enough, especially in the face of Amazon's improving \"you might like this\" technology, and internet discussion groups. I saw the same thing happen to Atlanta's Science Fiction and Mystery shop several years earlier, and was actually a bit surprised to see a Columbia operation try the same thing.<\/p>\n

I believe that after the shop left Capitol Centre, it went to Garners Ferry and then became a web operation<\/a> which is probably the only way to do it now, and good luck to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can't quite recall which storefront in the now largely defunct Capitol Centre plaza behind Columbia Mall housed Aliens & Alibis, but it was one of the ones pictured here. Aliens & Alibis was the right store at the wrong time. It was a book store which as the name suggested, concentrated on science fiction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1707],"tags":[26,82,24,78,5,4],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closing","tag-books","tag-capitol-centre","tag-columbia-mall","tag-dentsville","tag-historic","tag-stores"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}