Best Place to Nerd Out 2014 | Pegasus Books | Services | Bend

Best Of Central Oregon

Best Place to Nerd Out

Pegasus Books

Brianna Brey

Duncan McGeary has owned Pegasus Books in the same location on Minnesota Avenue. for 30 years. He is the second owner only to Mike Richardson, now the publisher of Dark Horse Comics in Portland, who owned the shop for five years before McGeary took over. The downtown store is legendary for anyone in Bend who ever identified as a nerd, geek, dweeb, smarty-pants or a generally awesome human being.

Pegasus sells everything. Comics, toys, sport cards, games (board games like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, card games and role-playing games like D&D and Magic the Gathering) anime and manga, art and all things pop-culture. It's so much more than just a sci-fi geek's paradise, it's a haven for literature junkies, too. The store carries books from Hemingway and Faulkner to Gillian Flynn and Cheryl Strayed.

"If I think a book is good, I'll try to carry it," said McGeary. "I like to have full selections of authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins and Philip K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Bukowski, that kind of thing."

Whatever you love with a fan-boy/girl passion, Pegasus carries it. And McGeary loves his job with that kind of same kind of passion. He has to, to keep an independent bookstore afloat during the age of amazon.com and after a stiff recession.

"My blog, The Best Minimum Wage Job a Middle Aged Guy Has Ever Had, has been going every day for almost eight years now. It started off being about downtown and owning a business and the economy. I still talk about those things, but I mostly talk about writing these days," he explained. McGeary wrote three mass-market paperbacks 30 years ago, "Star Axe", "Snowcastles" and "Icetowers". Recently, he was able to get back to writing and has cranked out "Led to the Slaughter: the Donner Party Werewolves," and a Vampire Evolution trilogy, "Death of an Immortal," "Rule of Vampire," and "Blood of Gold," all published by Books of the Dead Press and avalible online. He also just finished a book called "Tuskers" about—get this—a wild pig apocalypse in Arizona.

But it's not all pig-pocalypse. As evidenced by McGeary's inventory, he is also a comic book classicist.

"Marvel and DC are the biggest companies in my store, you know, Spider-Man and X-Men and Hulk, and Superman and Batman," said McGeary. "My own tastes are running toward independent adventure comics from Dark Horse and Image and the adult Vertigo line from DC. Titles like Saga, The Manhattan Projects, Sandman, The Unwritten, stuff like that. More sci-fi or crime or adventure than superhero. However, my guys at the store are loving the comics coming out these days from DC and Marvel. Hawkeye and Deadpool, and of course, Guardians of the Galaxy." (BB)