A Brief History of Confounded

As reported on the slog earlier, eclectic zine/book/underground comix shop Confounded Books will be closing forever Saturday April 29th, with shared retail-mate Wall of Sound expanding to take up the soon to be vacated space. In its seven year history, Confounded has changed ownership once and moved twice, from Fremont, to Belltown and then finally to Capitol Hill. Seattlest's sense of the store's history was foggy enough to merit contacting Confounded owner and operator Brad Beshaw for some help with the chronology.

Brad opened a store called Wavy Brain in 1994 in Albuquerque, NM, offering video rentals of the weird variety as well as comics, zines and books. Ilse Thompson opened Confounded Books in Seattle in 1998, with an emphasis on books of the world's greatest cartoonist variety. The two merged their stores together in Fremont in May of 1999 under the name Confounded/Hypno Video. In 2001 they moved the store to Belltown in the space adjacent to Jeff Taylor's record shop Wall of Sound (then located across the street from Mamas), where Brad says he had to drop the videos, partially due to limited space issues, and partially because he sold the inventory to finance the move. "Technically it never stopped being Confounded/Hypno," Brad told Seattlest, "but since the videos were gone I just dropped the Hypno part." Ilse left the store in early 2002, and then in May of 2003 Brad and Jeff moved their stores to the current spot on the Hill.

For the few remaining days of the store's existance: There will be a reading with Mykel Board (Maximumrocknroll columnist, author of Even a Daughter is better than Nothing) on Sat. March 25th, at 7pm, and starting April 1st, Brad will significantly reduce prices on all the remaining inventory, which should yield some pretty bitchin' scores considering all the bitchin' merchandise usually found there. At some point between now and the store's closing we'll have to go over in greater detail all the good times Seattlest enjoyed at fewer than all of the events held there; suffice it to say David Lasky's inspired/demented rendition of Al Pacino as the Moon ranks high on that list.

Photo by Rob Zverina.