I stopped in to St. Mark’s Comics one day last week to paw through what was left of the merchandise, a few days after the store’s owner, Mitch Cutler, announced a going-out-of-business sale.

On Sunday, after 36 years in business, the store finally closed for good. I’d been buying comic books there since it opened, when I was 7 years old, but I had never known Mitch’s last name. To me and my younger brother, Jack, the guy in the store wearing glasses was always just Mitch. We didn’t talk much. Most of the time I knew what I wanted and where to find it.

I remember when my mother first told me there was a store that sold nothing but comic books: It was a fantastical concept, unheard-of, dreamlike. I pictured an enormous, hushed, dim place, where comic books lay in rows of cubbyholes, like a candlelit library. St. Mark’s Comics wasn’t like that, but with its characteristic attributes of clutter and classic rock radio it was still a funky little temple of reverence.