{Photograph} by John Boydston
I didn’t have a file participant again within the early ’90s. However the first phrase within the title of the store on Peachtree Street, in Backyard Hills, was sufficient to make an 11-year-old child beg his mother to tug over and let him wander round inside: Fantasyland Information. It didn’t actually belong in broader Buckhead—that a lot I grasped even then. It didn’t belong to any world I knew as a comparatively sheltered sixth grader dwelling in Ansley Park and attending non-public faculty. The partitions have been coated in posters celebrating the counterculture and its hallowed icons. The tables have been full of crates with handwritten labels caught to them: Delta blues, prog rock, acid jazz. What on the planet, I puzzled, was acid jazz? I’d discover out.
The aesthetic of Fantasyland grew to become the aesthetic of my childhood bed room: on one wall, Hendrix setting his guitar on hearth; on one other, Morrison posing mischievously for Annie Leibovitz; Kerouac and Cassady sitting collectively above my bookshelf; Che staring defiantly at me—and anybody else who dared to look his method—from a closet door. Insurrection with out context, to make certain. An unearned sneer settled on my child face. Nonetheless, these posters supplied a view into different worlds, the place I’d ultimately wander.
Fantasyland Information was based 50 years in the past by a South Carolinian named Andy Folio. He’d began it as a comic book ebook store—the unique title mirrored this—however in the future he introduced in a field of data gathering mud in his residence and supplied them for 3 bucks every. Earlier than lengthy, data made up 90 p.c of Folio’s gross sales. He stocked what would in the end quantity to greater than 50,000 of them: LPs, 45s, 12-inch singles. A uncommon Beatles printing as soon as bought for $2,300, the all-time retailer file for a single album. He additionally added compact discs—which I had the tools to play within the ’90s—together with DVDs and different types of bodily media (together with plastic-encased Playboy magazines tucked in a again nook, which I eyed however by no means ventured into). Folio has stated that Fantasyland, which moved to Pharr Street in 2010, ought to actually be referred to as “the Home of Out of date Media.”
Technically, it’s. However like Videodrome on North Highland Avenue, Fantasyland is a industrial and cultural anachronism that has survived—up to now—as a result of it serves an important want that know-how can’t adequately meet: neighborhood. Once I texted some childhood pals concerning the place the opposite day, I instantly acquired half a dozen responses. Most have been elegiac. “In shedding these locations,” one pal wrote, “we lose these gathering factors and communities and rituals that when introduced a lot pleasure.”
However Fantasyland remains to be right here. I wandered in just lately and shortly discovered myself speaking with two strangers concerning the Cameron Crowe movie Virtually Well-known. They couldn’t bear in mind the title of the fictional band that the plot follows. I did: Stillwater. Subsequent factor I knew, one in all them was inviting me to a file conference in Stone Mountain that weekend. (I began amassing in my 20s.) The opposite identified a file of Jimmy Carter’s greatest speeches. In the long run, I settled on Aja by Steely Dan. Twelve bucks. There, able to ring me up, was Mark Gunter, the identical man who bought me all my posters way back. He was simply as reticent as I remembered him, however grayer. “I bear in mind you,” I stated. “Welcome again,” he informed me.
This text seems in our April 2025 problem.
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