Bookshelf #37

This week's bookshelf is another small one (in fact, so small that hte picture of it looks pretty wonky here) and is also part of the repurposed entertainment center that last week's shelf was. 

You'll probably notice that it is also not all comics. 

There are three stacks of books there: One stack that's not-comics, one stack that consists of a not-comic book and a not-comic book about a comics creator and then a stack of comics collections.

The first includes a pair of Norton literature anthologies, both purchased for college courses, and never disposed of because hey, I paid a lot of money for them and, unlike some textbooks, it wouldn't hurt to have collections of great literature on one's bookshelf, right? You never know when you might need to consult them (Note: I have never once consulted them since graduating, although I have now moved them from one apartment to another some dozen times). Atop those is a collection of Kenneth Patchen poems; I mentioned him a previous installment of this series, but he is one of my favorite poets, and I first became enamored with his work when I saw a collection of his "picture poems", which married imagery and a line or two of words (That's right, some of his work involved combining pictures and words, just like comics).

In the middle, we have Beautiful Poems of Jesus, which, based on the spine label with a Dewey decimal number, I must have purchased from a library book sale somewhere (and, um, have yet to get around to reading) and Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, a 2004 from publisher Abiogenesis that collected tributes to comics best (?) writer on the occasion of his 50th anniversary. These are mostly prose, but there are a few pin-ups and comics in there, and the contributors include the likes of Stephen Bissette, Will Eisner, Dave Gibbons, Terry Gilliam, Sam Kieth, James Kochalka, Jim Lee, Michael Moorcock, Jeff Smith, Bryan Talbot, Rick Veitch, Len Wein and many, many more. I know I reviewed this for the Columbus altweekly I was writing for at the time, but almost everything I wrote for them has disappeared into the ether by now.

The final stack is the one with all the comics in it. These seem to be comics published by DC that are outside of the DC Universe setting, and so we have a real grab bag of creators and genres: Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest: The Searcher and the Sword, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Will Eisner's The Best of The Spirit ("The Citizen Kane of Comics", according to a front cover blurb attributed to USA Today), Frank Miller's Ronin, 9-11Volume 1 (This one is actually published by Dark Horse, Image and Chaos, not DC), 9-11: The World's Finest Comics Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories To Remember (At some point, I think it might be interesting to revisit the half dozen or so such anthologies and tributes released back then and see how they hold up), Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Sleeper Vols. 1-3, Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco's Arrowsmith: So Smart in Their Fine Uniforms, Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris' Ex Machina Vols. 1-2 and Peter Tomasi and peter Snejbjerg's Light Brigade.