As of Friday, April 13, efforts are continuing to sell the assets of Fandom.com, including those of the retail operation, once the largest pop culture retailer in the US (see 'Fandom Closes Shop').  According to sources close to the situation, an 'assignment for the benefit of creditors' has been made, which means that the assets of the company are turned over to a third party that manages their disposition, pays creditors, and conducts an orderly wind-down of the business.  It's usually done in situations where the company believes it can avoid bankruptcy, and is more desirable -- it's a much cheaper and faster way of handling the disposition of a company than bankruptcy in most cases. 

The Fandom Shop site is still telling customers that a sale is in the works and the site will be unavailable until it's consummated, so no orders have been filled for at least a week.  The company's Manassas, Virginia packing operation was shut down Friday, April 7th, and no employees have been available to ship orders since then.  Presumably the more impatient among both the advance order and backlist customers of the site and the Fandom catalogues have begun finding other places to buy the $5-$10 million worth of pop culture products they bought from Fandom last year. 

ICv2 has confirmed that the lien on Fandom's Virginia inventory by Diamond owner Steve Geppi, originally reported by Comicon/Splash, is related to the sale of the assets of Another Universe to Fandom, as we speculated last week, and is not related to any debts between Fandom and Diamond, one of its largest suppliers.  Geppi, who had acquired a majority share of the Another Universe businesses (which included the e-commerce and catalogue businesses as well as a chain of brick and mortar stores), sold the mail order operations to Fandom in early 2000, taking a seat on the board of directors of Fandom in the process.  Geppi recently resigned his seat on the Fandom board and shuttered the brick and mortar Another Universe chain in January, effectively eliminating his connections to the retail business that once aroused so much controversy among Diamond's brick and mortar customers.