My local, in Springfield, IL, back in the turn of the Millennium, had two questionable locations.  One was a tiny building, about a block from a seedy motel (though also a couple of blocks from a Catholic grade school) and he got robbed, once.  There was a pawn shop next door, though with the bars on the comic shop window, it was hard to tell which was which.  he then moved to a new location, a mile or two away, but still in a marginal neighborhood.  He was still paranoid about someone breaking in through the window that he put up steel slats, which made it look like a pawn shop, again.

In Forsyth, IL, just a little north of Decatur, there is a place called The Old Book Barn.  It opened up about the time I was graduating from high school, in 1984.  It used to be an old auction barn, before the present owners bought it.  At first, it was heavily Harlequin romance novels, stacks of old National Geographics, then a smattering of old hardcover books and sparse displays of paperback genre titles.  My dad and I went to check it out, being big book lovers.  He found 2 or 3 Ernie Gann novels (wrote several aviation-based adventures) and a couple of medieval romances, while the only thing I found that interested me was a copy of The Dreaming City, the Lancer Books edited version of the first Elric story, from Michael Moorcock (hard name to live up to  ).  They grew though, and created themed rooms around genres and it was a great place to find collectible paperbacks and series.  They had comics, but always in pretty bad condition.  In later years, I took Barb there and they were also selling antiques and jewelry pieces, which interested Barb far more than old books.