Glee!

[blahflowers]

Been to a proper grown-up meeting of staff about the restocking of The Closed Library. It was even in a room with poor air conditioning and a glass of water that had been there for several days. There was a flip-chart in the corner but sadly it was left alone.

Things would be going surprisingly well if we'd had this meeting several months ago. Unfortunately we weren't, so there's a mild sense of crisis. I think it was roughly two thirds of the money to restock the library has been spent. Problems such as me being given £500 to spend on an area of stock on the computer which turned out to only have about £40 of stock were aired. It caused some amusement about the fact that anything remotely porn-related had fallen to me to buy, I really need that 'Librarian - Pervert - Warrior' T-shirt made for the reopening in the Autumn.

But the really good news is I've been given another £1000 to buy graphic novels for TCL. I'll be going on my own this time, so should give me a chance to get the things like Ultimates that I didn't get last time. But if anyone can think of anything that hasn't already cropped up here that's available in the UK let me know...

Comments

[carrot-rope.livejournal.com]

I'd defnitely reccomend getting some stuff by Adrian Tomine, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, Seth et al... It's incredibly obvious for me to do that, and I don't know if it's specifically what you're interested in here - but they all most definitely have some amazing work, collected in really lovely books. I've only ever seen work by Daniel Clowes in libraries out of all of them, and I think they are some of the most talented people working on comics today.

I'll just pop a little list of the absolute best (that I know of) in here, and most of them should be available from Amazon and Page 45.com if nowhere else... I think all of these would add a nice bit of variety to your list.

Adrian Tomine, Summer Blonde
Chester Brown, I never liked you + Louis Riel
Seth, It's a good life if you don't weaken
Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (although every library I know of now has about 3 copies! Just always in the kids section...) David Boring, Caricature (I'd say more, really, but these are the only collected ones I can vouch for)
Jeffrey Brown, Clumsy

Some Eddie Campbell might be an idea as well, and there's always stuff like Blankets, although that's a big and expensive book and I'm not sure how well it would fare in a library. (I always worry for the big volumes of Akira, which are rather like the Essential series of Marvel books).

I hope this helps a little! Just ask if you need some elaboration on any of this. There's obviously a lot more that I've merely heard of rather than got round to looking at myself, but I can most certainly vouch for the quality of practically everything from Drawn and Quarterly (and they have a lovely website should you need to research!).

[carrot-rope.livejournal.com]

Gah, sorry if that's just totally indulgent! They are my big comic loves.

Also: Page 45 is a shop in Nottingham, I just wasn't sure whereabouts you were based, although I'm guessing London (from remembering about all the meet stuff I've read about).

[blahflowers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, London, and I have to buy stuff from Gosh! only, though they can order stuff in that they haven't got on shelf.

[carrot-rope.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure they'd have most of the stuff I mentioned, it's all pretty popular and well regarded stuff.