Found on West Grand Avenue in Chicago, as storefront that takes customers "by appointment only."
This sign adorns the door to an otherwise unprepossessing two story brick building. I have no idea what the store sells, finds, or barters, but on a street bedecked with glass-front boutiques and Starbucks sidewalk cafes, the locked doors and drawn curtains evoke unlikely mystery. I don't want to know, because the reality will almost certainly not live up to the promise of an advertisement suitable for a story by Bradbury or Gaiman.
Nonetheless, it's the odd kind of thing I hope to see more of on my travels, and reminds me why some of my friends who are writers found their own journeys to be fodder for good fiction.
That's a lovely sign!
Your image doesn't seem to have displayed quite as intended, so I have converted it to a jpeg and re-uploaded it in case anyone can't view the above:
http://www.heffalumps.org/junk/estate2.jpg
Wow! A sign like that is a fabulous find although - as you say - best not investigated too closely for fear of disappointment.
(And thanks for converting the image, Bateleur, I was struggling with it.)
Thanks, Bateleur. It displays for me in Chrome (after a lag), but I'm still struggling with the intricacies of MT 5.0.
When it comes to images, I think we may give up and just start using a service like Flickr. On the one hand, I hate putting all the images on a separate host, but on the other, I can afford the bandwidth.
Thanks again, Bateleur. I've replaced the image with your jpg.