Literature Matters

I've been Spring cleaning and getting organized a little better lately. I've put a lot of comics and stuff up on eBay and a lot of books up on Swaptree. I'm going through the books I want to keep and deciding why I want to keep them. If I don't have a good reason I'll swap it. My books are organized by subject matter. We'll start with ART:Certainly there was never any doubt I was going to keep this one. These tame-by-today's-standards cartoons remind me so much of sneaking peeks at my Dad's collection of True Magazines when I was a kid. And Dan DeCarlo was the definitive Archie cartoonist. He created Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats. And the fact that a lot of the girls in these toons look like Veronica and Betty and others I've been crushing on since prepubesence makes this a must-have. In fact, there's a volume 2 I've been on the lookout for. If you see it at a reasonable price let me know.
Bookplates are one of those old-fashioned things that I just love. This book has the bookplates of famous people -- everybody from Harpo Marx to Herbert Hoover.
Sigmund Freud had a picture of a nude dude on his book plate. Hmmm, I wonder what that signifies.
Jack London's bookplate could be in honor of "The Call of the Wild" or "The Sea Wolf" or even "White Fang":Evidently Harry Houdini is the only guy arrogant enough to have a picture of himself on his own bookplates.My favorite -- probably because I'm such an Aubrey Beardsley fan -- is this one he designed for John O'Fallon Miller:More tomorrow.