I have a bunch of these Calvin and Hobbes books, purchased when Bill Watterson was still creating the strip for newspapers. Part of me wishes he were still plugging away as a cartoonist, but I respect Watterson for hanging it up while the strip was still a perfect work of art, fresh, funny and not tired, the way so many other strips get in their old age. He is sort of the J.D. Salinger of newspaper comics. Attempts to track him down have become something of a genre. He’s not that hard to find, but I imagine he’s tired of talking about something he did years ago. At least we have the various collections, including this one from 1990. I re-read them every now and then, and my daughter has recently been absorbed by them. I think it’s cool that she is being entertained by a great and funny work of art that I myself loved and bought a decade before she was born. I do wonder if she’s caught on that I learned most of my parenting style from Calvin’s father.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.