The owner and proprietor, Trent Dunphy, began with the front half of a small shop at 839 Larkin Street (currently the home of The Shooting Gallery alternative art space) with magazines standing in cardboard boxes on saw-horse tables. 

Currently the shop is open five days a week (Tues-Sat 12pm-7pm) and caters to a varied clientele ranging from locals, students and tourists to set and costume designers, media professionals and collectors. The building houses a vast collection of material dating back to before the turn of the 20th century with substantial inventories of popular titles like Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Time and Newsweek, the New Yorker and many others. There are also many boxes of ephemera like theatrical programs and flyers, rail and steamship timetables, local and worldwide travel brochures, menus, sheet music, as well as popular and collectible personalities ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Michael Jackson.

Robert Dennis Crumb (August 30, 1943 - Age 80) is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.

Crumb contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, Zap Comix, contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the East Village Other and many other publications, including a variety of one-off and anthology comics. During this time, inspired by psychedelics and cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, he introduced a wide variety of characters that became extremely popular, including countercultural icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his Keep On Truckin' strip. Sexual themes abounded in all these projects, often shading into scatological and pornographic comics. In the mid-1970s, he contributed to the Arcade anthology; following the decline of the underground, he moved towards biographical and autobiographical subjects while refining his drawing style, a heavily crosshatched pen-and-ink style inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century cartooning. Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo (1981–1993), which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. As his career progressed, his comic work became more autobiographical.

In 1991, Crumb was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book HALL OF FAME. He was married to cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom he frequently collaborated. Their daughter Sophie Crumb has also followed a cartooning career.