These books command your attention
The new Chris Ware book has sat beside my desk for weeks. It’s been tough to miss. It’s about a foot-and-ahalf tall with a canary-yellow spine, and the cover image is signature Ware: Comic book hieroglyphics of domestic ennui, linked by thin schematic lines, flow charts of word balloons and worried portraits of the genius himself. It’s like the blueprint for a bomb that leaves you melancholy. Even if I wanted to avoid it, I couldn’t: My desk is only slightly larger than the book, yet
($60, Rizzoli), a survey of an artist who turns only 50 this month, is perfectly outsized, correctly singular.
No wonder I have found the book routinely moved around my desk by curious coworkers. One day an anonymous Post-it was stuck on the cover, the message simply:
I get that. I haven’t been able to keep my hands off “Monograph” either. It includes giant reproductions of Ware’s New Yorker covers; a generous sample of his homemade toys and models (“dumb little gifts,” he writes); Ware even inserts, within the book itself, small, flippable reproductions of his smallest books. Until he receives the vast museum retrospective he already deserves, it’ll more than do.
It’s also a terrific example of the book as an object to savor, to obsess over.
For months I set aside works like this — books that distract, waving from corners of your vision, demanding another flip through. Think of these as excellent examples of inspired, and addictive, book design from 2017 — that each is also a good read is like icing. These are not books to compete with screens: Should you drop
($100, Taschen) on an iPhone, you’ll need a new iPhone. Had I been a 10year-old boy and found this absorbing history of the 20th-century paintings commissioned by natural history museums to explain the discovery of dinosaurs, I might have faked a cold daily.
For book people, there’s sweet irony here.
The Age of Screens has meant a renaissance for physical books as keepsakes. For instance, Picador may not be the first publisher to regift old books in cool packages, but its new pocket hardcovers ($16 each) of classics by contemporary female writers like Barbara Ehrenreich
and Joan Didion
are too smart to quibble with. Hillary Chute’s
($40, Harper) is not only another thoughtful argument for the importance of comic books, but as charmingly illustrated and approachable as the works it considers. Canadian publisher Biblioasis’ pamphlet-size ghost stories from Dickens, Wharton and others — meant to revive the forgotten tradition of telling spooky stories at Christmas ($6.95 each), and designed by Canadian cartoonist Seth — present both the air of menace in many children’s books and the durability of classic commercial illustration.
Obsession, though, in its repetition and way of forcing us to lean forward in horror and delight, is a thread through many of these books. It’s why you can get lost in
($29.95, 1984 Publishing), 200 pages’ worth of sandwich ads from a Cleveland restaurant. The beautiful reissue of Lynda Barry’s underrated autobiographical novel
($21.95, Drawn & Quarterly), about race and falling in love with records, gets 50 pages of new art, much of it Barry’s folk-art-ish paintings of music pioneers.
($29.99, Black Dog), which was flat-out the most enjoyable experience I had with any book this year. Wertz, best known for her memoiristic comics and New Yorker strips, gives an illustrated, random everyday New York City, drawing the same corners a century apart, providing mini-histories of food carts, backroom bars, serial arsonists, street cleaning. The stories are funny and personal, the surprises endless.
Everyday, these books richly suggest, doesn’t mean ordinary. To flip through the long, thin
($29.99, Black Dog), the book itself must be turned on its side.
That said, ($29.99, Black Dog) fascinates on the strength of its material alone, from a rare image of a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson protesting, to Gwendolyn Brooks preparing a lecture.
($69.99,
($50, Harper), when you question the necessity of knowing every last bar stool story from the set of the classic, of including actual schematics and a replica Western Union telegram — even if it is from Francois Truffaut to Steven Spielberg. But then book waves to you from the edge of your coffee table ....