Incoming Books: August 21

For some reason, I found myself poking through the great remainder seller Edward R. Hamilton's website the other day -- actually, I'm not 100% sure Hamilton is still around, or if he ever existed in the first place, but there's been a business with his name on it for at least twenty years and that's good enough for me -- and, since I am weak, the following books showed up on my doorstep today.

(I'll provide Amazon links, since I get a kickback on those, but, if you're interested in any of these books, you're nuts if you don't check Hamilton first and get them dirt-cheap.)

The Old Reliable, yet another of the seemingly endless stream of P.G. Wodehouse books in lovely little hardcovers from Overlook. They will run out one day, I know. But today is not that day.

How to Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books, the official book for the thirtieth anniversary of the wonderful Diagram Group Prize, introduced by The Bookseller's Joel Rickett. It's the kind of book that people who love books love, and it doesn't get better than that.

The Secret Pilgrim, a 1990 novel by John Le Carre in a 2008 edition. I may try to get all of the Le Carres I can in the new spiffy Penguin editions -- since I recently read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and finally discovered him officially -- but this will at least give me one to have about the house in case I suddenly decide I need a little Smiley in my life right now.

Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, a retrospective of the career (funny division) of one of the most humorous and humanist writers of the past fifty years. I reviewed it when it was published a couple of years ago, but that was a library copy -- now I have one of my own.

The Best American Comics 2008 -- I don't feel so bad about buying this one. Sure, I did lose my original copy in my flood of '11, but that was a galley to begin with, which I got for free. (I'm much more annoyed about all of the books I spent good money on and didn't get to read.) I reviewed this back in the day for ComicMix.

The Irredeemable Ant-Man, collecting what I think is the whole 2006 Marvel series written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Phil Hester and Cory Walker. Every so often, I dip my toe back into long-underwear comics, usually with books that are either goofy or outright parodies. This falls pretty comfortably into that bucket, I think.

The Best of the Rejection Collection, re-collecting a bunch of cartoons the New Yorker rejected, under the editorial eye of Matthew Diffee. As I understand it, this doesn't quite act as a compilation of the original Rejection Collection and the inevitable sequel, Vol. 2, but it does have a lot of the material from those two books and not a whole lot (if any) additional stuff. But I lost those two books in the flood, so this looks like a double bargain to me.

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories: Volume 2, the ungainly second anthology of comical stuff edited by Ivan Brunetti back in the year eight. It's too clever by half -- see my review for ComicMix -- but it's full of good stuff that I no longer had, and it was going cheap.

The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book is a thing that exists -- first the New Yorker just published cartoons, then they published cartoons without captions, and asked their readers to make up the funny, and then they published a book of the resulting assemblages, and, even later than that, the book was remaindered and cast into outer darkness. It's edited by Robert Mankoff, and I like New Yorker style cartoons -- and have even intermittently entered the contest.

The Cartoon History of the Universe and The Cartoon History of the Universe II, since there's no way I could live without having some Larry Gonick around the house. I may try to get my sons to read these, if I can figure out how to forbid them from doing so first to make it more enticing.


The National Lampoon's Encyclopedia Of Humor, an artifact from the magazine's '70s heyday (edited by the inimitable Michael O'Donoghue) reprinted sometime recently as part of a not-terribly-successful attempt to revitalize the brand. (I've got a couple of other books from that effort, which survived the flood but still haven't managed to get themselves read.)

And last is yet another book related to the New Yorker: Blown Covers, collecting a bunch of paintings and other pieces of art that didn't quite make it onto that magazine's cover, edited by its art editor, Francoise Mouly. I may be obsessed with the New Yorker, I admit.