“This is something that has always been in the back of my mind,” Steve Geppi told the York Daily Record in September 2006. “This is a dream come true for me.” That dream encompassed seventeen thousand square feet of space inside a historic train station in downtown Baltimore. Geppi filled the second floor with every childhood toy imaginable, as well as a large assortment of comic books, lunch boxes, and movie posters.
From 2006 until 2018, the resulting collection of memorabilia was open to the public as Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, a must-see destination for popular culture aficionados from across the country. Where else could a life-size Batman share space with an original animation cell featuring the first color appearance of Mickey Mouse? Or, traveling back in time even further, a copy of the May 9, 1794, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, in which the first editorial cartoon – Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” – was published?
As one might have guessed, Steve Geppi’s first job was at a comic book store. He later opened his own shop – Geppi’s Comic World – in 1974 in the basement of house. Ever expanding, Geppi launched Diamond Comic Distributers eight years later, which quickly became the exclusive distributor of comic books in the United States. In 1998, the budding entrepreneur added Hake’s Americana & Collectibles to his growing stable of businesses. In addition to pop culture companies, Geppi also collected pop culture memorabilia of all shapes and sizes. He began offering invitation-only viewings of his collection in 1995 before opening Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in 2006.
“It’s a pretty astounding place,” Ted Hake, founder of the self-named pop culture auction house, told the York Daily Record of Geppi’s. “If you have any interest in your own personal past or any sense of nostalgia, there will be things there that will ring all kinds of bells for you. This is the stuff people grew up loving and remember with fondness. It’s a very personal experience.”
For Steve Geppi, the memorabilia he collected was more than mere entertainment as they also told the story of American popular culture. Geppi’s Entertainment Museum was therefore organized into time periods, with historical information intertwined with the items to put them in their proper context.
In his 2006 book Pop Culture with Character: A Look Inside Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg walks readers through the various sections of the museum. The journey begins with “Pioneer Spirit,” covering the years 1776 through 1894. Highlights included authentic porcelain replicas of Palmer Cox’s Brownies – “whimsical, fun-loving creatures” based on Scottish folktales that originally appeared in St. Nicholas magazine in the early 1890s – as well as an assortment of mechanical banks.
The years 1895-1927, meanwhile, witnessed the birth of the newspaper comic strip, including Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and the premier of Buster Brown. The 1920s also saw the rise of science fiction pulp magazines, establishing the genre as a major literary force throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Two other entertainment giants debuted between the years 1928 and 1945 – the comic book superhero and Mickey Mouse – as well as Bugs Bunny and Betty Boop.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Howdy Doody, and the advent of television stole the pop culture spotlight during the 1950s, while the Beatles, James Bond, and the Marvel Comics Universe took center stage the following decade. Star Trek and Star Wars soon elevated science fiction to even greater heights as the years rolled on, while action figures were transformed from children’s toys into adult collectibles.
In 2008, Archie Andrews from Riverdale was hired as a night watchman at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in a special “Free Comic Book Day” edition of Archie’s Pal Jughead. “Geppi’s is the history of the country told through pop icons,” he explained to Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. “For a pop culture maven like myself, it ranks just below Santa’s Workshop and Willie Wonka’s Factory. Imagine the nation’s premier collection of toys, comics, animation cells, movie posters, and more – all under one roof!”
Unfortunately, Archie’s enthusiasm failed to generate the attendance numbers and crowd sizes that Steve Geppi had hoped for when he launched his museum in 2006, despite being located adjacent to the home of the Baltimore Orioles. “People don’t go there when they go to the ballgame,” he told the Baltimore Sun. As a result, Geppi decided to permanently close Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in 2018, as well as donate over three thousand items from his collection to the Library of Congress. What was Baltimore’s loss became Washington’s gain – although Geppi was quick to point out that the nation’s capital was a mere forty miles away.
“What I found so amazing about the collection, the material that’s on offer, is the fact that it’s so diverse,” Georgia Higley of the Library of Congress told the Baltimore Sun of the donation. “You kind of get an idea of the interconnections of popular culture, which that collection demonstrates really well.”
The centerpiece of the donation – which was valued in excess of a million dollars – were the comic books that Steve Geppi had amassed over the decades. “As I have interacted with people in our buildings and at other libraries across the country, I have found that when you tell them we have the world’s largest collection of comic books, they do a doubletake, because it makes them think about the Library differently,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden told the Washington Post.
Hayden played a key role in Geppi’s decision to donate his collection to the Library of Congress. In 2008, an anonymous donor gifted the Library twenty-four pages of original artwork from Amazing Fantasy #15, which featured the first appearance of Spider-Man. Carla Hayden arranged for a private viewing of the pages for Steve Geppi – something he remembered when it came time to donate his own collection
“Comics needed to be put in a setting where they were seen as valuable,” Geppi explained to the Washington Post. “Can you imagine having Action Comics No. 1 sitting right next to the Gutenberg Bible in a display – putting it on that level of importance in pop culture?” Anyone who ever visited Geppi’s Entertainment Museum during its twelve years of existence already knows the answer.
Anthony Letizia