Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Sketchbook: 37 Years of Art & Insights

The third and final installment of the artist’s sketchbook series.

The eagerly awaited conclusion to Chris Ware’s facsimile sketchbook Acme Novelty Datebook series has arrived after over fifteen years. This third and final volume compiles over 37 years of sketches, revealing private hostilities, humorous depictions of strangers, and musings made during bus rides, airport delays, and beyond. Known for his work in the New Yorker and Le Monde, Ware crafts each page with fine art doodles, personal reflections, and artisanal rewritings that highlight his distinctive, often unreliable, narrative style. This 208-page edition features Ware’s commentary and an introduction, bound with paper boards and a cloth spine for an understated, collectible finish.

Chris Ware stands out among illustrators, bringing an unmatched level of creativity and mastery to his work. His unique inspiration and inventive techniques make each piece a joy to explore, offering layers of thought and artistry that continue to captivate. I deeply admire not only his work but also the creative process behind it. Drawn and Quarterly has consistently gone above and beyond to showcase his art, presenting his books in innovative formats that elevate his vision and add another dimension to the experience.

Exquisitely crafted fine art doodles, hand-selected meanderings and artisanal rewritings of personal conflict are scattered throughout comic strips unconsciously revealing private hostilities and unflattering portraits of public transportation riders, the whole carefully cleansed of any impugnable or litigious tracery. As a professional adult picture book drawer and regular contributor to the New Yorker, Le Monde and the Illinois Cook County Assessor’s office, Mr. Ware’s work on these pages secures his reputation as a reliably unreliable self-narrator, willing to say or write anything to win petty disputes and imagined squabbles.

Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three features full-color pages with insightful annotations, an introduction, and a tongue-in-cheek apology. Bound in understated paper boards with a cloth spine, it cleverly disguises its subtly provocative nature.

All three Acme Novelty Datebooks are also available in a compacted and easily recyclable slipcase, the spine of which is punched through with a training timepiece for those caregivers who would like to adjust its miniature metal hands as a teaching aid to suit their pedagogical exercise, private nostalgia or personal anxiety. As with the first two volumes, this third and, again, very final volume clocks in at 208 full-color pages augmented by annotations, an introduction and a professional apology, with paper boards and cloth spine of misleading demureness to conceal its native prurience.

Limited numbers of bookless slipcase boxes will be made available for those hominids who purchased the first two volumes on the original occasions of their first printings. Due, however, to miscommunication to the printers over the scale of the second printing of the first edition — the “rare and oversized edition,” in collecting parlance — its size will not allow admittance to this slipcase unless severe violent force is applied, to any deleterious results from which the legal representatives retained by the publishers insist they cannot and will not accommodate.