Collecting cool cartoons

Last week I bought myself an early Christmas present - the Jitterati book by Grant Buist. This week I finished reading it, after eking it out for as long as possible to make the joy last. The book is awesome, and there are several things about it which are particularly awesome.

Firstly, the title on the cover is done in liquid coffee, and it comes with a little sack of quality Havana ground coffee. These two things together mean that the whole book smells of coffee and continues to do so for several days after the Havana is removed. As I purchased the book one week after giving up coffee, I found the smell distressing and blissful in equal measure.

Secondly, Grant has included a few cartoons which qualify as very early forerunners to Jitterati. These are great, and also provide the opportunity to examine how Grant's art has changed over the years. It makes the book a bit more special.

Thirdly, the book is sprinkled with little stories in the style of the making-of doco, including one page actually titled "The Making Of". These provide a little bit of insight into both the content and form of the cartoons, as well as Grant's life (useful for those who don't read his blog).

Fourthly, and most awesomely, there is an index. Not an index of the cartoons' text, like those compiled by ohnorobot, but an index of content. So if you want to show someone that neat cartoon which is made entirely of Smiths lyrics, instead of leafing through the book muttering "I just know it was 2005... no... maybe 2004... honestly, I must have gone past it", you can just look up "Smiths (band)" in the index, and turn straight to the strip you want.¹ The index references are even broken down by strip as well as page, so you're spared the (excruciating) pain of having to read all four strips on a page to find the one you were after. This is so epic I've taken to looking up randomly chosen keywords in the index, just to see if Grant wrote a strip about them.

The Jitterati book is awesome. It comes with a CD, too, which is probably also awesome (but I haven't looked at that yet). If you can find one, by all means buy it... or steal someone else's if you have to. But don't steal my copy, cos I'll know it was you. I can see you, you know.²

¹ No, I'm not linking to it. That would defeat the purpose of the book index.
² That's a subtle and topical reference to something from the book, naturally.