Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld Review

Tom Gauld’s latest comic strip collection, Revenge of the Librarians, is a bookish-themed one and, perhaps being a bookish chap (as you are too, probably, being on this supposedly-book site - oh, you’re here to natter about the She-Hulk TV show and post Office reaction gifs? Well I suppose it’s also a social media site…), I really enjoyed this one.

There are a lot of wry observations on writers, editors, readers, and the book business in general, most of which get repetitive after a spell, and of course the inevitable COVID strips (“The Bookshop Cat and the Pandemic”, “Waiting for Godot to Join the Zoom Meeting”, “Options for Buying Books During Lockdown”, and “Reading Suggestions for Summer 2020: On the Sofa by Kerouac, Around the House in 80 Days by Verne”, to name a few) which aren’t bad.

The book is full of strips showcasing Gauld at his inventive best. Like clever new German words for readers (“buchverlusterliechgterung” = relief upon finding that you have lost your copy of a book that you weren’t really enjoying), Further Instalments of the Famous Six Word Short Story “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn”, useful abbreviations like tl;dr - “rb/gb = Read a Bit, Got Bored”, and Summer Reading for Conspiracy Theorists: Slaughterhouse 5G, The Old Man and the CIA.

Gauld comes up with some ingenious bits like generators for eccentric families for novelists to write about and thriller concepts that work really well. The “choose your own adventure”-style strips are fun, as is the Great Book Festival Race board game and the maze puzzle for helping a new book find its place in the market. The infographics (My Reading Year) are brilliant and amusing - some of these non-traditional strips were among the best in the book.

I could go on and on about the stuff I enjoyed - Hunting for Easter Eggs with Werner Herzog, the Samuel Beckett Advent Calendar (Darkness. Nothing. A rock. Nothing again.), Seductive Criticism, Discomfort Reading, First Draft Fiction, the Marioland literary festival - but I’ll settle for mentioning the strips that made me genuinely laugh. Plots of Forthcoming Jack Reacher Books Revealed, the horror passage that’s really an editor’s note on a writer’s work, and Advice on Caring for Your Books That Also Works for Parenting are all hilarious.

Not all of the strips are winners but the good thing about strips is that they’ve over quickly and you’re onto the next one in no time, and overall the good definitely outweighed the bad. Also, if you get the hardcover, you get a cute library checkout card on the interior pocket - a nice touch. Librarians feature occasionally but this one’s mostly about books as a whole.

Tom Gauld fans will pick this one up regardless but it’s also worth a look if you’re the bookish type and looking for a funny, breezy and entertaining collection of cartoon strips about reading, writing and all the hell/joy they entail. Revenge of the Librarians is Gauld’s best collection in years!