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

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.

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.

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

As featured on NPR's All Things Considered with Robert Siegel on Feb. 7, Princeton University Press author Philip Freeman, the translator, speaking about How To Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians.

SIEGEL: And there's one piece of wisdom at the beginning that I found most striking and sounded to me most modern. He said, every day as you go down to the forum, you should say to yourself, I am an outsider. I want to be consul. This is Rome.

FREEMAN: It was great advice for him to do every day because as an outsider, Marcus Cicero, stood very little chance of being elected as consul, so he always had to remind himself just what he was up against.

SIEGEL: He sounded to me there like a sports psychologist, telling him to visualize, you know, imagine yourself...

FREEMAN: Oh, absolutely.

SIEGEL: ...being consul of Rome. I also love this line. He wrote, now, my brother, you have many wonderful qualities, but those you lack you must acquire and it must appear as if you were born with them.

FREEMAN: Absolutely. Cicero, like I said, was a fairly shy and reserved person, so Quintus wanted him to learn to be an actor. And that's really at the heart of a lot of the advice he gives him, is how to act like a person who cares about voters, even if you really don't.

How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians
by Quintus Tullius Cicero
translated by Philip Freeman
Princeton University Press | 9780691154084 | $9.95 | Feb 2012

My most-played & favorite artists/tracks from 2011 (Spotify playlist)

Honorable Mentions

My most-played & favorite albums released in 2011

Honorable Mentions

The Channel 4 reporter seems intent on making this clip more about HIM rather than Leon and his cool story, but the bare bones do peek through.

Amazing Adventures of a Nobody
by Leon Logothetis
Bettie Youngs Books / SCB Distributors | 9780984308132 | $14.95 | Oct 2011

Above, a photo from the Bettmann/CORBIS Archive.

No Crystal Stair: A Novel in Documents, Based on the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller
by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Carolrhoda LAB / Lerner | 9780761361695 | $17.95 | Feb 2012 

I read a book today that's coming out from Carolrhoda LAB/Lerner next February - a YA novel told in the form of an oral history - about Lewis Michaux, founder of the National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem.  The book is written by his great-niece, Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie.

Michaux's was the first (the first!) bookstore specifically selling books by and for African-Americans. He had a sign up over the storefront that proclaimed it "The House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda". 

The National Memorial African Bookstore was in the middle of everything and everyone from the Harlem Renaissance up through the Civil Rights struggle and into the Seventies: Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Eldridge Cleaver, Nikki Giovanni and more. Thousands and thousands of regular bookstore customers' lives were enriched by the presence of such a passionate, intelligent bookstore owner in their midst.

Although Michaux's bookstore is no longer open – it closed in 1975 after a faceoff with the State of New York over the state's redevelopment of the blocks surrounding the store's original building and a brief tenure in a second location blocks away – Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and R. Gregory Christie have brought it back to life in these pages, accompanied by dozens of historical photographs.

Booksellers, bloggers and reviewers can obtain an advance copy now through NetGalley.

"Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn't cross the river. They didn't crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks, and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks."

After The Apocalypse: Stories
Maureen F. McHugh
Small Beer Press/Consortium | 9781931520294 | $16 | Oct 2011 

You can read a sample at Small Beer's site.