Tag Archives: books

I must have been on drugs: I haven’t mentioned the brilliant and exquisite Virginia Postrel in some time. I have been a fool. Virginia has a terrific column in the NY Times on the history of information: Indeed, a new book argues, to understand why the West not only grew …

The cover to Mystic Funnies #3 (Fantagraphics) is reassuringly familiar to anyone who’s followed underground comix guru Robert Crumb all these years: a car-choked urban setting where Flakey Foont – Crumb’s whiney everyshlub – is being lectured by a typically statuesque femme. “Out of the pain comes the pleasure, out …

While the music download case is crucial to the future of P2P services on the Internet, another copyright case is the first criminal test of the DMCA: “This case is about selling a burglar tool for software in order to make a profit,” assistant U.S. attorney Scott Frewing told jurors …

I have complained here rather vociferously that many entertainers are ill-informed, naive, and/or just good old-fashioned stupid regarding politics and policy. They are, of course entitled to their opinions, but the danger lies in the fact that entertainers hold much sway over fans, and are at minimum going to have …

Leftist Italian journalist and former Resistance fighter Oriana Falacci’s brave, now famous screed from against anti-Semitism, in particular European anti-Semitism, has been made au courant again with the recent dismissal in a French court of a request to ban “The Rage and the Pride” on the grounds that it incites …

According to Publishers Weekly, Harvard University Press and Acme Bookbinding have entered into what could be a revolutionary arrangement involving print on demand: John Walsh, production manager at HUP, said that the books in the program have all been printed as facsimiles of the last edition, and that there have …

Audible.com getting rave reviews, this one from the International Herald Tribune: The Internet offers an alternative to buying or renting audio books by mail: Download the books you want to hear. This, however, presents a copyright problem – think of Napster and its successors. Publishers are reluctant to make their …

Comics Journal mines it’s archive of audio interviews with Comics notables for a 1989 discussion with Gilbert Hernandez, now one-third of the creative team behind the comic book that launched a thousand indy comics, Love and Rockets. Gilbert discusses his comics-obsessed childhood, his influences, the /Heartbreak Soup/ stories, drawing, how …

The 2002 collection of Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” strip, Zippy Annual, (Fantagraphics) opens with a sequence that shows the cartoonist at his most playful. In it, a tearful retro comic strip femme – redolent of the kind of kitschy figures Griffy used to parody in his Young Lust underground …

Superhero comics! Superhero comics! Superhero comics! In snazzy hardbound reprints, no less!