Train Car #7 contains: The Sticker Store

When I was little, sometimes on very special days my mom would take me to The Sticker Store. They had this wall of receipt-paper rolls of Hambly stickers, tigers and horses and rainbows and birthday cakes and tiny, twinkling stars. In my memory, the whole store is dark and empty except for the enormous sticker wall lit by a single spotlight, although from the review photos online that appears not to be accurate. I was allowed to pick out one sticker roll, and tear one sheet off. I took my time with this impossible decision–faced with all the riches of the world, how could a person choose just one? I fell in love, and I’ve been in love ever since.

The real-world sticker store, Avalon on Grand, was a knick knacks shop in St. Paul, Minnesota full of a riot of greeting cards, toys, gag gifts, jewelry, books, magnets, mugs, disco balls, kooky signs, and oriental rugs. It closed sometime in those odd intervening years after I’d left Minnesota but still stopped through enough that I thought I still knew the city. Maybe Avalon was a victim of the pandemic or of changing tastes. It had always been slightly out of time, even back in 2009 when my mom took me there after school; the Hambly stickers that I loved so much were designed back in the 1980’s, and according to Harry Hambly’s obituary, Hambly Studios closed down in 2012, leaving behind only backlogs of holographic stickers in midwestern tchotchke stores. Carrie's Sticker Collection has the best archive of them that I’ve found online.

At seven years old I most definitely picked the horse stickers every time, regardless of the length of deliberation. Or possibly the unicorns. But I’ve compiled some of my favorites here, crunchy PNGs that I ripped from sticker websites and ebay listings, cropped and recolored to maybe look like real stickers. Feel free to grab some–in this sticker store, you don’t have to pick just one.