Bookshelf #17

We finally come to the very last set of bookshelves that I have in the downstairs of my house. Again, these contain my most recent comics collections and graphic novels, those acquired between 2012 and 2014. I have plenty more bookshelves upstairs though, and those are all filled with books I acquired far earlier, probably between 1991 and 2011 or so.

Because this is my newest set of shelves, it is also that with the most room left for new books on it.

The organizing principle for this particular shelf? Well, here size was a big factor. 

To the left, you will find a bunch of Drawn and Quarterly books of a bigger size, from the fancy shmancy 2014 Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition still in its shrink wrap (I'll get to it one day, I swear!) to a couple of Little Lulu hardcovers. There's a wide variety of books between them, the one thing they all have in common being their size and the fact that they are from D+Q...with the exception of an AdHouse collection of Jay Stephens' Welcome to Oddville, which I guess I stuck there because, like those D+Q books, it was far too big to stick with the other books from that particular publisher that I have. 

On the right? Well, these are mostly collection of comics strips. Nancy is well represented, by the quite recent Nancy Wears Hats from Fantagraphics, a very old 1988 copy of The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (published by Henry Holt, edited by Brian Walker and purchased at 2024's Nancy Fest at OSU's Billie Ireland), The Nancy Show published in conjunction with Nancy Fest (and a book any fan who couldn't make it in person should have on their shelf), a couple of collections of Olivia Jaimes' Nancy and Bill Griffith's superior Bushmiller biography, Three Rocks. (Sadly, The Nancy Show is a little too horizontal for the shelf, so it juts out further than the spines of all the other books, which naturally bugs me a bit every time I look at this shelf.)

There's also a collection of Tony Millionaire's Maakies, Charles Addams' cartoons and Jeff Smith's crowd-funded Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986, collecting OSU student Smith's comic strip for the school paper The Lantern, which he later transformed into the influential self-published comic Bone. (This too is wider than the shelf is deep and thus it also juts out past the spines of the other books.)

Finally, and more randomly, are a couple of books placed there for size more than content: And old and battered The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes Vol. 2: Wonder Woman that I saved from the weeding at a library (in the time before Wonder Woman Chronicles and the DC Finest collections, the next best thing to reading the old William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter Golden Age Wonder Woman comics was reading about them), Yoe Books/IDW's Alice In Comicland (a part history, part anthology devoted to four color adaptations of and riffs on Lewis Carroll's Alice books) and Yoe Books/IDW's Super Patriotic Heroes (a part history, part anthology devoted to lesser star-spangled heroes like The American Crusader, Captain Fight, The Fighting Yank, Man of War and the like...even MLJ's The Shield and Quality's Uncle Sam put in appearance, the latter in a strip by Will Eisner).