Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Book Review: Classics of Western Literature Bloom County 1986-1989

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989

Author: Berke Breathed

Author's web site: www.berkeleybreathed.com

Publisher: Little Brown & Company

Date: 1990

ISBN: 0316107549

Length: 251 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by the author

Quote: "So, the Meese Commission on Pornography thinks they can actually intimidate the American publishing establishment into yanking our panels if we say 'snugglebunnies,' eh?"

This is the big fat commemorative collection of Bloom County cartoons that became a bestseller, and is therefore easy to find, and therefore currently cheap. The story lines you remember are in this book, but not all of the cartoons from the story are. Comparing Classics of Western Literature with Billy and the Boingers Bootleg shows the difference: about half of most of the stories from Billy and the Boingers Bootleg made it into Classics, and a few stories were completely omitted from the retrospective volume.

However, Classics of Western Literature goes further...all the way to the sequence where, in real life, Breathed decided to stop drawing a daily cartoon, so, in Bloom County, Bill the Cat bought out the strip, fired all the characters, and caused them to move to the "Outback" Sunday-only series. Plus this volume includes a few pre-Bloom-County cartoons in which Steve and John appear as college kids.

You can now buy complete collections of vintage Bloom County cartoons directly from the author-artist, but if you buy Classics of Western Literature as A Book You Can Buy From Me, Breathed (or his favorite charity) will receive $1 out of the $5 for the book and $5 for shipping. As discussed elsewhere on this web site, if we ship more than one book to the same address at the same time, we can consolidate the shipping fee without reducing the payments to living authors. E-mail salolianigodagewi@yahoo.com.

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