Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three - (Acme Novelty Library) by Chris Ware (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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

After over fifteen years deferral, delay and dawdling, the ink-and-paper cheerleader F. C. Ware finally succumbs to imaginary public pressure by concluding his tiresome experiment in reader trust with the third and final volume of secret notebooks and sketches spanning over thirty-seven years of bus rides, airport delays and telephone hold music.

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 in these pages secures his reputation as an reliably unreliable self-narrator, willing to say or write anything to win petty disputes and imagined squabbles.

208 full-color pages augmented by annotations, introduction and a professional apology, with paper boards and cloth spine of misleading demureness to conceal its native prurience.

Review Quotes

"A completely unique kind of comics memoir... Ware's work is always formally diverse but here that's even more true than in his fiction, to the reader's great benefit." --Sam Thielman, The New York Times Book Review, Best Graphic Novels of 2024

"A beautifully constructed collection of his sketchbooks." --Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post

"A gorgeously printed, lovingly curated exhibition of Ware's short-form work and sketches." --Chris Barsanti, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Genius unplugged... a refreshing and illuminating departure." --Rob Salkowitz, Forbes

"A must-have for fans [and] a rare chance to get to know the artist behind such an incredible body of work." --Steven Heller, Print Magazine

"Spanning 2002 to 2023, [Acme Datebook Volume 3] is filled with illustrations of his daughter as she grows from infancy to college age, sketches of subway riders, renderings of children's toys and stately foyers, pandemic musings, concepts for New Yorker covers, watercolor experiments, intricate schematics, and several notes about his own hopelessness. [His work is] exacting, tender, vulnerable, and punctuated with his trademark self-deprecation." --Kristen Radtke, The Verge

About the Author

Chris Ware is a writer and artist and has contributed graphic fiction and thirty-two covers to The New Yorker since 1999. The author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, and Building Stories, which was chosen as a Top 10 fiction book by both the Times and Time in 2012, his most recent Rusty Brown was finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein award and named among the New York Times' top 100 Books of 2019. His work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York and the Galerie Martel in Paris. In 2021, Ware received the Grand Prix de la Ville d'Angoulême and a solo retrospective of his work was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2022, traveling on to venues in Switzerland, Italy and Holland; it will conclude at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2025.