As you tell at a glance here, this was, at one point, where I was storing the volumes of Fantagraphics' The Complete Peanuts series that I had purchased (the other volumes I own, and other Fanta Peanuts comics, are on a shelf we looked at a while back). In addition to five volumes of the series, there's a trade paperback version of the first volume, that collecting strips from 1950 to 1952, so I guess even though there are many, many volumes I don't have, I have the first volume in two different formats...? (This is one of those series I wish I had been more diligent on keeping up with).
Aside from Peanuts, there are three other books on this shelf.
On the far left, there's Fredrik Stromberg's 2005 The Comics Go to Hell: A Visual History of the Devil in Comics, a heavily illustrated book about comics rather than a comic itself (I'm pretty sure it's stuck here rather than with other prose books about comics simply because of its little size). On the far right is a minicomic version of Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson's 1979 adaptation of the original Alien movie, which was first published by Heavy Metal (If I recall correctly, this minicomic came as part of a big, fancy collection of the Aliens movies that the library had purchased, but as it wasn't practical to circulate it with any of the DVDs, it went into an up-for-grabs pile along with the stickers and posters that sometimes came with such sets) . And laying across the top is Drew Weing's Set to Sea.
Perhaps of greater interest, or at least providing more material to talk about, are the stacks of little books atop the shelf. This is my collection of tiny little books.
Here, I'll spread them all out on a table so you can see what they actually are...
The only comics-related books here are the Masters of the Universe mini-comics, the only half-dozen or so I had saved since I had originally acquired them, packed with the original action figures, in the early 1980s.
Actually, the first of these, entitled "The Vengeance of Skeletor", bearing a 1982 copyright and carrying the signature "Alfredo Alcala" on the cover, is a little storybook rather than a comic, as Mattel must have switched formats at some early point. That particular story is pretty interesting because it predates the cartoon series. Many of what we now consider to be the familiar aspects of the basic He-Man story had yet to be solidified at that point, and thus this story contradicts the later lore.
The other five, from 1982 through 1984, are all comics, though (And were thus probably the first actual comics I had read, outside of the funnies in the newspapers). Only two of them have actual credits listed in them, and both of these are by writer Gary Cohn and artists Mark Texeira. The most recent of the minicomics, "Grizzlor: The Legend Comes Alive", has Bruce Timm's signature visible on the cover and in the last panel. If you're interested in these, Dark Horse collected all the Masters of the Universe mini-comics in a massive 1,200-page hardcover, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Minicomic Collection Vol. 1, which I started reading when it first came out, but have yet to finish.
There are also a half-dozen "Penguin 60s" books. These are slim, sixty-page paperbacks that the publisher released on the occasion of their 60th anniversary in 1995. I'm not sure if Teenage Caleb was collecting them, or just buying ones he was interested in, but it looks like I have ones featuring the work from J.M. Barrie, Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mark Twain, plus one devoted to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats and one entitled Three Tales of Horror, which was comprised of three short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Each of these cost a mere 95-cents, so I imagine I was impulse-buying them at the counter of the Waldenbooks in the Ashtabula mall at the time. Now, thirty-one years later, I kinda wish I would have bought all of them, as that's a great deal for quality literature in such an appealing format.
Each of these cost a mere 95-cents, so I imagine I was impulse-buying them at the counter of the Waldenbooks in the Ashtabula mall at the time. Now, thirty-one years later, I kinda wish I would have bought all of them, as that's a great deal for quality literature in such an appealing format.
Unfortunately, the orange spines are all rather faded, and the pages are rather yellowed, especially at the edges, so I guess I probably didn't store them as well as I could have over the course of the last three decades.
Speaking of bookstore impulse buys, that's certainly why I have in my possession tiny little books Unauthorized Posh Spice in My Pocket, a little collection of what I would guess are wire service photos of my favorite Spice Girl paired with facts about her (I posted about this on Bluesky, where I guess you can get a sense of just how small it is), and a doll-sized 190-page retelling of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by writer David Blair and illustrator Graham Evernden.
There's a decent amount of religious books, most of which I must have acquired in grade school (This being a comics blog, there's rarely ever an occasion to discuss faith, religion or philosophy here, but I'm a currently only sporadically practicing Catholic, meaning I rarely go to church, but I did attend Catholic schools kindergarten through college and I got all my sacraments).
There are a pair of tiny books entitled My Mass and My Holy Communion, both of which are children's instructional books about their subjects (Both of these, I see, say "Caleb from [my sister's name]" in a grown-ups hand-writing on the inside front cover, so I assume these were First Communion gifts "from" my little sister, who would have been in first grade at the time).
There's a book on praying the rosary entitled Pray the Rosary, which may have also been a First Communion gift, and it looks like it may have come with a rosary at some point.
And there's a Miniature Stories of the Saints Book III, which is filled with one-page biographies of various saints on one page with an illustration of the saint on the facing page (And which also has a water stain on the back of it, a thing I've been conditioned to notice after years of working in a public library).
Oh, and there's a little green book from Gideon's International: The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with Psalms and Proverbs. I believe a street evangelist of some sort had handed me that in downtown Columbus at one point, and it seemed like a good thing to hang onto for reference, although, now that I think of it, I'm not sure if I've ever actually consulted it, as I generally just use the Bible I'm most familiar with, the one I had to buy for one of my college courses (That's a battered copy of The New American Bible, copyright 1987, if you're interested in such things).
On the top row in the picture above, you may notice two books with small titles sandwiched between the book on the saints and the book about the mass, each of which has a cover image of fields of flowers. One says Life's Journey on the cover, while the other says Comfort. Both have copyrights from something called the Salesian Mission of St. John Bosco and are from 1981 and 1983. I'm not sure how they came into the possession of my grandmother, but I remember her always having such little booklets lying around her house when I was little. They are collections of prayers and inspirational thoughts, all illustrated with anodyne images of nature or quaint buildings, with no people or religious figures ever appearing in them. She died from breast cancer at just 58, when I was only eight years old, and these are among the few things of hers that came into my possession (along with a rosary). I confess that I've never really read anything from these books, and, in fact, this is the first time I've touched them in years. But I've kept them more as talismanic connections to her than anything else (That grandmother, by the way, bought me my first He-Man toys for Christmas when I was five, so some of those MOTU minicomics are actually from her too).
Finally, there's a copy of City Lights Books' "Pocket Poetry Series" presentation of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (I went through a brief Beat phase in the second half of the nineties, before I decided that comics were a better medium than poetry) and a copy of Retrospective: Guy Maddin, a brochure published in conjunction with Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts' 2002 Guy Maddin retrospective, which was awesome, and which introduced me to the work of the extremely quirky and gifted filmmaker. Here, you should go watch his Heart of the World short film on YouTube right now. A frenetic silent film-inspired disaster epic about the end of the world, an unlikely love triangle and the power of love and cinema (and/or art in general), there's hardly a better way to spend six minutes.
