As I stated, we’re appearing again at the Unique Los Angeles design and gift sale, and I’m extremely happy to announce these exclusive book signings!

Travis Millard

2pm, Saturday, May 2nd

Travis Millard will be signing the massive book collection of his art and comics, Hey Fudge (Narrow Books).

Esther Pearl Watson

2pm, Sunday, May 3rd

 Esther Pearl Watson will be signing her graphic novel, Unlovable Vol. 1 (Fantagraphics). Unlovable is the humiliating but hilarious story of Tammy Pierce, unpopular teenager, and is loosely based on an actual diary found by the artist in a truckstop bathroom.

Megan Whitmarsh

3pm, Sunday, May 3rd

Megan Whitmarsh will be signing her new book, Yeti Logic (Rojo). Yeti Logic is a beautiful limited edition hardcover collecting Megan’s drawings and embroidery work.

The Unique LA event happens on the massive penthouse floor of the California Market Center (110 East Ninth Street, LA, CA) on May 2nd and 3rd. Narrow Books will be at booth 1009, next to the on-site bar and lounge. There’s a whole lot of great stuff there, and you’ll want to give yourself several hours to shop the wares of all the designers and vendors. Be prepared, admission costs $5, but it’s well worth it!

A lot of Narrow Books action this week. For the Unique LA event, we’re adding more titles to the catalog of books we’re selling that we didn’t print. First off, two collections of Neil Swaab’s Mr. Wiggles strips.

Neil published the first collection of his comics strips himself and then the second collection was published by the very eclectic NBM. The Mr. Wiggles strip has been featured as an alt-weekly strip, and Neil’s work in that context has been compared a lot… to other artists… This of course is the insult we often deliver to a unique artist’s work, and I’m going to be no different (see my next paragraph). But yeah, his work on Mr. Wiggles has been compared to Johnny Ryan, Pete Bagge, Tony Millionaire, Bill Watterson, and that guy who does Dilbert (which is such a freakish assortment that it gives lie to the whole idea of comparisons). The strip’s a fun read and he’s not afraid of carrying story lines across multiple strips, which for me has always been a favorite when it comes to strips and of course is why I’m a bigger consumer of strips in book form than in the pages of papers.

But the other thing that I’m really interested in about Neil is his work outside of the strip (see his personal site at www.neilswaab.com). First off, I’ll mention that he’s been part of the team on the cartoon Superjail, which Mark and I were just discussing last week, and which is an amazing freakshow of a cartoon that left us both surprised but very happy. For my part, I caught my first episode just last month, very late at night in a casino hotel room when I was trying to go to sleep… and I couldn’t turn the television off until it was over. Then there’s Neil’s illustration work, which for me (and here’s those damned comparisons) reminds me of Sala, Burns, and even a dash of Dave Cooper (minus the fat bottomed girls). (See above and below for examples.)

And then we’ve also gotten our hands on some of the work of John Pham, who’s this great artist and designer who’s also got a grasp of story, which of course is a perfect marriage—in fact I believe any artist who doesn’t have a respect for narrative is always going to be crippled… John’s never going to have that problem.

We’ll have John’s Sublife Vol. 1 (Fantagraphics), which is an amazing anthology of his comics… Rather than trying to describe it here, just follow the link above to the page at Fantagraphics that has a great slideshow of the book (just scroll down).

But, and! we’ll also have issue 3 of 1-Up megazine, the video game zine that John designs… As an example of how smart a designer he is, I urge you to investigate how rich he’s made the thing using only two ink colors. Of course it’s a great zine, with a lot of great content, but Heck! If you’re at all into printing and publishing, check out the magic trick he did there just from a design point of view.

Over at Narrow Books we’re starting to experiment with carrying books by artists that we like that we didn’t actually have anything to do with pressing. This began as a very casual step when we started selling hand-made books and zines by artists we’d worked with at events, notably Travis Millard’s Who Let the Gods Out and Bite the Bedbugs Back books, and the amazing Chillo

by Mel Kadel, which usually leaves shoppers open-mouthed and leering. (The time Mel takes in coffee staining the pages really… well, it really makes every book feel like an art object, if you’ll pardon my cornball.)  (Both of those books can be found in the shopping section of Travis’ site.)

Then recently came Megan Whitmarsh’s Yeti Logic, published by Rojo. Since Rojo’s in Spain, and the book is a limited edition, and we like Megan’s work so much, we thought, let’s get more of these books over the sea before they sell out. And Rojo very graciously agreed to letting us become another “distributor” of the book, though in fact I suppose we’re more like a store without a storefront.

The thing is the public events we participate in allow us to power-up into store mode, and showcase and sell anything we like directly to the public. There’s this jargon-y term now, “pop-up” stores, which basically you can just substitute the word temporary for “pop-up” and not have to sound like a douchebag. The upshot for Narrow Books is, from time to time, temporarily, we’re a store, not just a publisher. Which is great.

For example, it means that we’ll be able to show people Esther Pearl Watson’s Unlovable Vol. 1, which was a book we’ve known would come into existence for years (always secretly wondering if we might one day be able to press it), and but we weren’t surprised or chagrined when the awesome Fantagraphics put it out this year. The book came out and they did justice to it with a really nice hardcover release and plans in place to print the future volumes. It’s rad. And Fantagraphics is going to let us sell it at the Unique LA event on May 2nd and 3rd. Because now we’re sometimes a store.

See? Awesome.

The LA Times Festival of Books is a pretty big affair, and table prices are beyond what we at Narrow Books like to think of as our “budget”, but writer Joseph Mattson, who has been a contributor, editor, and now the star of our first solo fiction release is going to be signing at the Book Soup booth. I’m sure he’ll be signing our book of his short stories, Eat Hell, but he also might sign some copies of our last anthology, TL Vol. 2, which he contributed to and helped to edit.

Not sure what time he’s signing, but will update here as soon as I know.

Then on May 2nd and 3rd, Unique LA is having its second event, and we’ll be there again. The organizers of this giant independent design market really seem to have their sh*t together. The event happens in an impressive upper story space at the California Market Center downtown, taking up a whole floor—trust me, you’ll want to spend several hours there, at least. And they’ve had the foresight to have press-only openings on the first day so that the many vendors of clothing, handicrafts, and, in our case, books, can have a more relaxed dialogue with bloggers and journalists as they wander through.

It looks like we’re going to be placed next to 826LA, which sounds nice, and sounds as if the organizers may’ve set up an informal “literary section”? (There are currently three formal sections for art galleries, purveyors of kids’ and babies stuff, and green eco-products.)

NOTE: Special to the Unique LA event, we’re going to be presenting some great books from other publishers, including Megan Whitmarsh’s Yeti Logic, which was published by Rojo in Spain. And I think we’re going to have some signings go down, will update here when I know the details!

I can’t write longhand. I know a bunch of great writers did, and on even relatively recent books—Infinite Jest was written in longhand! Yikes!

But so I have my tools here. The most important one, the beast with primacy, is The Magnet. That’s the pet name for the IBM Selectric III that I write my fiction on (and which was a fantastic gift from Elana). Called The Magnet mostly because of its electric motor that sometimes won’t turn on till ten seconds after you flip the switch, but also a half-cornball come-hither-muse voodoo epithet.

So… why a typewriter. It’s not for reasons of affectation or insistent Ludditism, I swear. I’m just a believer in keeping writing and editing separate, and the typewriter’s like those weird braces that force a golfer to swing correctly. The belief’s not universal; a number of my friends edit as they work (or “in-between”), they’ll use word processing software to do a quick polish on the last paragraph before moving on. But I’m strictly against it. I don’t want to get stuck over-thinking a sentence that was perfectly fine. I want to spit everything out as fast as it comes, keep moving. The subconscious is where all the best work comes from; when you’re really into some fiction, writing and reading are both hypnagogic. I don’t want to kill the trance or the momentum by taking a break to fix ANYTHING. Let the word be misspelled, let the last sentence be stuff of grammatical nightmare, let the term or the name I can’t remember be a hastily typed “xxxx”.

As you can imagine, then, even though it’s a correcting typewriter, my correction ribbon never gets any use. The Magnet is for first drafts only. Editing is for later. More specifically, the first edit comes later when I retype the pages into a computer.

In the meantime, the typed pages need somewhere to live… They go in the fire-safe plastic/concrete box. Yes, they live in the box, which I’ve been assured will withstand flood or fire. (For the curious or likewise paranoid, this box is a Honeywell File Chest, which when I bought it was sold for $50 and free shipping. The price seems to have gone up… They may have realized offering free shipping for $50 purchases and then selling something that costs exactly $50 and weighs over thirty pounds was a bad idea.)

And then for screenwriting, I use Celtx, which is in so many ways better than than its competitors, and on top of that, is open source and free. I know that my own experience of Final Draft was filled with amazement, a lot of head-scratching along the lines of: “This is a ‘finished’ software product? Why are there so many paint bugs? Why is this abomination a ‘standard’?”

The other thing about Celtx is that it has a lot of built in tools for managing your film if it’s something you’re going to shoot yourself. You can record all sorts of information, like phone numbers and availability of your cast, contact info for locations, details on props you’ve acquired or ones you still need, audio files for temp or final score… And then again, if you just want to write, you can forget about those tools, and it’ll just be the straightforward script software you wanted. The other nice thing is that if you feel obligated to pay something for the work that went in to making Celtx, they’ll only encourage you to donate $5 to Against Malaria.

The contributors to Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson’s What’cha Mean, What’s a Zine? were invited to make one-of-a-kind hand-made zines for a show at Junc Gallery in 2006. I enlisted the help of of illustrator and comics artist Jamie Tanner, and together we produced this zine. Jamie mailed me the tiny inked watercolors and I placed them into a book that I glued and hand-stitched (the gallery provided the paper and cover stock).

As there was only the single copy, not too many have seen it before. But so here it is. You can appreciate Jamie’s ability in light of him turning the art around in just a couple days, on top of his own busy schedule.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

This imagined childhood was heavily influenced by actor Jeremy Brett’s (best Sherlock ever) public comments on how he imagined Holmes’ youth, and on the biographies of Conan Doyle that I was able to lay hands on.

It was also the result of research I’d been doing on a dream project, a film script that was jokingly referred to as “Sherlock Holmes Begins.” In the original Holmes stories, Sherlock’s a bit of a cipher, creep, and spider. Not someone you can pal around with or understand. As someone says on the Granada DVD commentary, “his heart is asleep”. So Watson was really the window for the reader; the normal human/heart they could attach themselves to, the source and receptacle of empathy.

I wanted a story that would have the scruples not to conflict with any of Doyle’s stories, but would explain why Holmes was such a misanthrope. And in doing so, allow a viewer to say, Yeah, Holmes is a warped creature, but now I understand him, I get why he is like he is. I don’t need Watson to put a human face on this story. I have an emotional attachment to a man who’s done a great job at becoming emotionless.

But last I checked, we’re going to get hit with two Sherlock Holmes films that threaten to savage the character with poor regard for the original stories. This pet project is indefinitely shelved.