page_title: Forbidden Planet (bookstore)
section_title: Founding
hierarchical_section_title: Forbidden Planet (bookstore) / History / Founding
caption_attribution_description: English: Exterior of the New York City Forbidden Planet at 832 Broadway in Manhattan, as seen on opening day, July 24, 2012. The store had previously been three doors north at 840 Broadway, on the southeast corner of East 13th Street. This photo was created by Luigi Novi. It is not in the public domain, and use of this file outside of the licensing terms is a copyright violation. If you would like to use this image outside of the Wikimedia projects, you may do so, only if I am properly credited, either by linking the photograph to this page, or with an easily visible credit placed near the photo in each instance in which it is used. Please credit authorship as follows: &#160;© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. Please maintain the original file name in all uses. You can see a gallery of some of my other photos here. If you have any questions, you can contact me by sending me an email or leaving a note at the bottom of my talk page.
context_page_description: Forbidden Planet is the trading name of two separate UK-based science fiction, fantasy and horror bookshop chains across the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States, and is named after the 1956 feature film of the same name.
  The shops sell, in addition to books, comic books, graphic novels, manga, DVDs, video games, and a wide variety of toys, clothing and other collectible merchandise.
context_section_description: Forbidden Planet London is the name of the cult entertainment Megastore in London, UK, flagship of a national chain that includes Megastores in Bristol and Southampton, other stores throughout the midlands and the south of England, and an online presence. Specialising in movie and television merchandise, the stores retail art toys, comics, collectibles, DVDs, and graphic novels. They also host signings and events with authors, artists and other figures from cult media. Forbidden Planet London was the third major comics store in the city, eventually replacing what had been the leading shop, Derek Stokes's Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, which had started in 1969, and coming after Frank and Joan Dobson's Weird Fantasy in New Cross. Much of FP's growth came after the demise of Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, which went out of business in 1981. Forbidden Planet had grown out of the Titan Distributors business of Mike Lake, Nick Landau, and Mike Luckman; Titan itself having grown out of Comic Media Distributors.
  The first Forbidden Planet began life in 1978 as a small store in Denmark Street. As the scope of the store expanded beyond comics to embrace film and television, a second store was opened just around the corner on St Giles High Street. The store's success led to overcrowding, necessitating a move to much larger premises on New Oxford Street. The original partners, in addition to improving their London store, paired with James Hamilton and Kenny Penman (today the main shareholders in Forbidden Planet International with Andrew Oddie, Richard Boxall and Colin Campbell) to open other stores. Penman and Hamilton were owners of one of the UK's oldest comics and SF stores, Science Fiction Bookshop, in Edinburgh, which opened around 1975. On 30 September 2003, the London store moved to even bigger premises at the northern end of Shaftesbury Avenue.
  Forbidden Planet opened a second Megastore in Clifton Heights in Bristol in 2005, and a third in Southampton in 2007. In 2006 the company launched forbiddenplanet.com, an e-commerce retail site offering a wide range of products and hosting details of the company's many events and signings.
caption: The Forbidden Planet in Manhattan, New York, at 832 Broadway
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