Waffle

The more books I remove from my collection, the more I enjoy it. It's almost as much fun as buying new books! For the first time in years, instead of having my bookshelves overflow and groan under the weight of the reading material accumulated on them, I have more shelf space than I need and one of my bookshelves is now home to some of my DVD's. That said, a lot of the books I've taken out are still in a large box, waiting for new owners, so do feel free to have another look at the previous installments of Books that are going.

Because I want to downsize further, much further, before moving out of my apartment, I have pulled some more books from my shelves. They are:

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics. McCloud's three scholarly works on comics, in comics form, that many people adore and as many people vehemently disagree with or tut-tut at. At this point in my life, someone else needs them more than I do. Update: These are taken.

Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bisette, Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics. Published in 1993, this is a collection of interviews with some of the people who shaped American comics in te 1990s: McCloud, Larry Marder, Jack Jackson, Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Colleen Doran, Todd McFarlane and others.

Mat Schifferstein, ed. and others, Stripjaar 1997, Stripjaar 1998, Stripjaar 1999-2000 (Dutch). These were yearbooks containing an overview of comics-related events during the past year, State-of-the-industry essays, some good interviews and a service guide containing contact info for cartoonists, comics stores, publishers and comics-related organisations. The service guide part of each of this book is now very outdated (though as late as 2005, organisations and individuals were still using the information from the last one to send press releases to me), but the interviews and other editorial content are still well worth reading.

Terry Jones, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic. Novelization of the HHGTTG-based video game Update: this book is now taken.

Paul Krugman: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century (Hardcover) Krugman is still one of the few economists worth paying any attention to at all, but I don't think I will ever re-read this collection of essays from the New York Times dating back to the late 1990s and the first few years of the 21st Century.

As before, all books are free of charge if you have an address in Groningen, the Netherlands, and/or can arrange a pick-up in that fine city; outside Groningen, they can be yours for the price of shipping them to you; count on costs up to € 25 for shipping multiple books to far-flung locations such as Australia, but usually much less than that.

I'm sure everyone has seen the comic Scott McCloud did for Google Chrome by now? It's rather entertaining and does a decent job at explaining what's good about Chrome even though it's not entirely succesful at making a complex, nerdy subject seem simple. It's definitely a sign though that Scott has arrived... though when Jim Woodring did work for Microsoft, it didn't quite manage to make him a household name.

I do wonder if Google are going to need it translated into other languages, and if so, whether they will be working through their normal channels