Linkbait: What a bookseller's brain looks like (via Politics & Prose tumblr)

Via the Politics & Prose tumblr, a terrific image by Sergio Monterrubio - originally posted at Dribbble. Find Sergio on Twitter.

How to best demonstrate the awesome might of Fantagraphics' new Johnny Gruelle collection, Mr. Twee Deedle?

Perhaps a picture? (Click picture for full majesty.)

Perhaps another picture with another, well-known, book added for scale?

It's more akin to flipping the pages of a wallpaper sampler than a collection of historic comics. This book is 18 inches tall and 14 inches across. It dominates the largest clear surface in my house - the kitchen island - like a B-52 bomber somehow parked astride an aircraft carrier's deck.

And then you open it up. First published in early 1911 - over 100 years ago now! - the art on the page is massive, but filled with delicate details. Cross-hatching, fine lines, skinny pen to create outlines, subtle washes of color. Many of the strips are illustrated from eye-level of small children, and the natural world around the characters seems almost life-sized.

Mr. Twee Deedle: Raggedy Ann's Sprightly Cousin - The Forgotten Fantasy Masterpieces of Johnny Gruelle
By Johnny Gruelle
Edited by Rick Marschall
Introduction by Tony Millionaire
Fantagraphics / W.W. Norton | 9781606994115 | $75 | June 2012

From Fantagraphics' page about the book, some more context (you can click through to see a 12-page sample of the stunning interior pages):

The title character in the Sunday color page, Mr. Twee Deedle, is a magical wood sprite who befriends the strip’s two human children, Dickie and Dolly. Gruelle depicted a charming, fantastical child’s world, filled with light whimsy and outlandish surrealism. The artwork is among the most stunning ever to grace an American newspaper page, and Gruelle’s painterly color makes every page look like it was created on a canvas.

Gruelle’s creation was the winning entry out of 1500 submissions to succeed Little Nemo, which the New York Heraldwas losing at the time to the rival Hearst papers. With such import, the Herald added a $2000 prize, a long contract, and arguably the most care devoted to the reproduction of any color newspaper comic strip before or since.

Yet the wood sprite and his fanciful world have been strangely overlooked, partly because Gruelle created Raggedy Ann immediately after the strip’s run, eclipsing not only Mr. Twee Deedle but almost everything else the cartoonist ever did.

You'll want to follow the Fantagraphics Tumblr blog, too, for daily wonder and awe.

Joe Meno's new novel, Office Girl, is coming soon! Early reviews & tour details here.

Office Girl

by Joe Meno
with black-and-white illustrations by Cody Hudson and photographs by Todd Baxter 

Akashic Books / Consortium | 9781617750762 | $14.95 | July 2012

Chicago-based author and longtime indie-bookseller-favorite Joe Meno is back with his latest novel, a short and sweet story set in Chicago, circa winter 1999. I loved it.  

He's heading off on a nationwide tour starting at Chicago's Printers Row lit fest and a book launch at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square on June 28.

From the book's site, a capsule description:

NO ONE DIES IN OFFICE GIRL. Nobody talks about the international political situation. There is no mention of any economic collapse. Nothing takes place during a World War.

INSTEAD, THIS NOVEL IS ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE doing interesting things in the final moments of the last century. Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who's most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set in February 1999--just before the end of one world and the beginning of another--Office Girl is the story of two people caught between the uncertainty of their futures and the all-too-brief moments of modern life.

Early reviews have been strong for the book:

"Fresh and sharply observed, Office Girl is a love story on bicycles, capturing the beauty of individual moments and the magic hidden in everyday objects and people. Joe Meno will make you stop and notice the world. And he will make you wonder."
--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

"Meno has constructed a snowflake-delicate inquiry into alienation and longing. Illustrated with drawings and photographs and shaped by tender empathy, buoyant imagination, and bittersweet wit, this wistful, provocative, off-kilter love story affirms the bonds forged by art and story."
--Booklist (*starred review*)

"The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999...When get weird as things do when we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending."
--Kirkus Reviews

"High on quirk and hipster cred."
--Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)

The inspirations behind the simpler & cleaner my3books look

I've spent some time tidying things up here at my3books HQ, changing some colors around, finding a new typeface, removing some unwanted elements from the page layouts. And much of the inspiration has come from a couple of really smart designers and bloggers that I follow. Thanks for the inspiration, guys!

Jeffrey Zeldman is a legendary web designer and publisher, and he published a new web design manifesto last week that calls for simpler page designs and larger type. In an era where web apps and mobile apps such as Instapaper and Readability are almost required to tiny fonts and cluttered page designs into something approaching simple legibility – his thought process feels revolutionary. He wrote "...it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone."

Another design guru for me in the blogging and online world has been Los Angeles-based culture blogger Bobby Solomon, whose main online home is The Fox is Black, a blog that covers movies, books, music, graphic design, and architecture. Back in April, I noticed that he'd completely revamped The Fox is Black with a cleaner & simpler site design. Earlier this week, he linked to the Zeldman manifesto in a post about his own thoughts on the site redesign and their two posts really got me thinking.

So using my own limited web design skills and the tools built into the Squarespace site kit, I took out some extraneous social media modules, I lightened up the colors, moved some of the details about each post down to the bottom, and most importantly pumped up the type sizes. While I didn't go all the way up to 24px for the text typeface, most of what you'll be reading on this site is now pegged at 18px. Even on pocket-sized mobile devices, posts should be clearly legible. And on devices like the new iPad, with its Retina Display, it looks pretty sweet.

I welcome your feedback, though I'm thinking a lot about what Bobby wrote on his redesign post - he took out inline comments, trusting instead to feedback by email and via social media channels, saying "I’ve ripped out the comments from the site. 98% of comments are unnecessary, like correcting a spelling error I made or saying “That’s cool!” Neither of those comments really add to the overall story or conversation, and a lot of times there’s no conversation to be had." My experience on my3books has been that for every one comment I receive that's from an actual person wanting to add to the dialogue on this site, at least 20 have been spam posts. Something has to change, but I haven't decided what to do yet. So for now anyway, feel free to comment here.

It's coming up on my3books' three year birthday in June (June 6, to be exact!) and while I've never matched the pace and energy I was able to put into it those first six months, I feel invigorated and inspired to continue writing and posting here. I hope you'll keep coming around.

Looking at Fall 2012: Little White Duck: A Childhood in China (Lerner/Graphic Universe)

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China
story by Na Liu & Andrés Vera Martínez
illustrated by Andrés Vera Martínez
Lerner / Graphic Universe | 9780761381150 | $9.95 | Oct 2012

It seems like every season there's a book on the Lerner list that sneaks up on me and is either utterly charming (see the Monkey With A Tool Belt series) or is completely, mind-blowingly revelatory (see No Crystal Stair).  In the case of this fall's Little White Duck, we seem to be in the middle ground, right in the sweet spot between charming storytelling and pretty remarkable personal memoir. This graphic memoir is based directly on the memories of author Na Liu, one of two sisters growing up in China in the mid to late 1970s.

In later life, she immigrated to the United States and married cartoonist Andres Very Martinez, who encouraged her to tell her life's story, which he has illustrated with real verve.

It's already received a starred review from Kirkus, and I expect we'll see more. Kirkus calls Little White Duck, “a striking glimpse into Chinese girlhood during the 1970s and ’80s.”  Click through to the Lerner / Graphic Universe blog post about the starred review, and you can see some interior pages.  Here's a bit more from the Lerner blog post:

Based on the early life of the book’s author Na Liu—now a doctor of hematology and oncology—and illustrated by her husband–Andrés Vera Marténez—an award winning artist and graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of Visual Arts—this page-turner is described by Kirkus as “beautifully drawn and quietly evocative”. The book explores, in eight stories, author Na Liu’s—nicknamed Da Qin (Big Piano) and her younger sister Xiao Qin’s (little piano) childhood in Wuhan, one of the nation’s largest cities, right along the Yangtze. Different aspects of China’s history are weaved into the book—from the “Four Pest Campaign”, a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the country fought back against the ravages of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and cockroaches—to the observance of the Chinese New Year—Na’s favorite holiday—a time of national pride and great celebration.

This is already one of my favorite books for the fall.