Welcome to Heaven, Mr Sorry

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

My latest for Atlas Obscura is up! I reported on Reid Byers's truly wonderful "imaginary books" collection on display at the Grolier Club in Manhattan right now—and I got to sit in on his class about how to make an imaginary collection at the Center for Book Arts!

These are physical books that were mentioned in other books, split into three categories: "lost," "unfinished," and "fictive." All three are delightful, but the fictive category has *so* many fandom favorites—Death's memoirs from Discworld, a monograph by Sherlock Holmes, Stephen Maturin’s Thoughts on the Prevention of Diseases Most Usual Among Seamen, an entire case of the in-universe books of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, and many more.

Kubla Khan by Coleridge (if the man from Porlock hadn’t gone and interrupted him at a crucial moment)

Outside the Town of Malbork—but due to a printing error, this volume contains a different book entirely—Leaning From the Steep Slope. (All of them fictional books found in fragments in If on a winter’s night a traveler)

A concise francophone guide to English poetry by an intellectual gentleman by the name of Humbert Humbert

That famous volume of the Encyclopedia of Tlön discovered and described by Professor Borges.

Hannah Jarvis’s seminal monograph on the hermit of Sidley Park, whom she proves conclusively was the former tutor Septimus Hodge.

The manuscript of The Oak Tree: A Poem, which its author/authoress labored over through four hundred or so years (and multiple genders)

Jonathan Strange’s masterwork, The History and Practice of English Magic.

And finally—and maybe this is the funniest one of all:

A recent New Scientist cartoon.

Intaglio print from William Blake’s series For the Children: The Gates of Paradise (1787-93).

Your brain is a 25-watt computer.