There’s something about an underground space. While others abide by the norm of striding along sidewalks, stepping below street level is a sojourn to discover the hidden, the secret, the unusual at the Underground Book Gallery. Descending steps, you find the subterranean world of Justin Schlosberg—artist, writer and curator for the analog soul.
The bustle of nearby NW Wall Street fades as you step into the low-ceilinged, 600-square-foot space lined with roughly 20,000 used books, from beat poets and classics to a mass-market sci-fi paperback collection and antiquarian finds. What at first seems like strictly a bookstore quickly reveals its other self: art gallery. Among the shelves, black pen-and-ink works catch the eye. The art depicts the Elusive Taloned Penguin, Schlosberg’s spindly-armed take on the Penguin Books icon. On the canvases, the Schlosberg’s Penguin spouts off “factoids,” quirky, satirical musings and mischief, drawn with Ralph Steadman-esque gonzo print, ink splatters and blotches.
To wit: Factoid #557 is mixed media—the penguin strums a guitar drawn as a wedding couple dances under festival string lights, and words reveal that the Elusive Taloned
Penguin gigs classical guitar at weddings. “Incidentally,” it’s explained, “this couple met playing pickleball.” Factoid #911 tells us the Elusive Taloned Penguin was fined$50,000 for betting on himself in professional laser tag, spent a month in federal prison with cellmate Pete Rose, but “fortunately, it didn’t exclude him from being inducted into the Laser Tag Hall of Fame in 2002.” Penguin is inked on the glass of a framed 1949 Life Magazine cover devoted to French alpine racer Émile Allais who is airborne and leans over his ski tips. A thought bubble over the flightless bird’s head says, “Wow, that’s photoshopped.”
The character came to Schlosberg a few years ago, when he riffed on the publisher’s logo with a nibbed ink pen in hand. “I extended the arms on it and wrote a little story to go along with it, what I called ‘factoids,’” said Schlosberg, black ink stains lining his hands. His girlfriend, Bernadette Foley, who cofounded the shop, liked it and encouraged him to make more.
“They’re kind of like the mascot of the store now—and [the penguin] has all these different adventures.”
In 2022, Schlosberg opened the shop with mostly art and a few books after operating a bookstore in Breckenridge, Colorado, for 19 years. Underground Book Gallery could be considered out of the box, as could Schlosberg’s own books. My Family Album began when Schlosberg opened what he thought was a John Adams biography box set and discovered, not books, but a stash of someone’s family photos from the 1950s and ‘60s. Curating the images, he mounted them on album pages and began layering on his darkly humorous calligraphy.
His next book, A Peculiar Day in Coney Island, was a short story that Schlosberg reworked as a young adult book, collaborating with a friend on the art. It tells the metaphorical tale of a boy who wants to be treated like an adult. Things change on a strange day in Coney Island when he meets Mysterioso, who runs the freak show. The book is an exploration in much the same way a visit to the bookstore is filled with mystery and discovery.
On First Fridays, Schlosberg pours sake, and musicians pull up a seat at the piano. Other nights, the group Upstairs Poetry hosts readings. Any time in this subterranean spot, though, offers a journey beyond the ordinary and into the delightfully eccentric world that Schlosberg has crafted for creativity, humor and serendipity.
Explore more of Bend’s Underground Book Gallery here.
More on Our Local Bookstores
