Comics Librarianship: A Handbook

Heavily skimmed from cover to cover and experienced awe, admiration, jealousy, and most of all, amusement. Scott is a fantastic writer. He is acerbic yet thorough and thought-provoking. I never laughed so much reading a LIS book. Especially valuable is Chapter 4: Cataloging Comics. Here, Scott's demonstrates his life's work and this reader found it quite impressive. Keep in mind, it was written in 1990, so much of the discussion on academics' and librarians' attitudes towards comics are outdated.

From Chapter 1: "The first thing to do to become a comics librarian is to get a librarian's position in a research library... there's room to make a difference, but you have to be able to see beyond the job you're hired for. After you have the show more job, see if you can talk people into starting a comics collection. you might have to engineer a big donation to do that. Next, engineer some more donations... When researchers have trouble, be there to help. When the disorganization of the collection starts to impede reasonable use, argue for cataloging. when impecunious scholars start arriving from all over the world, let them stay at your house. When the comics start to crowd out the rare Shakespeare volumes, do some fundraising to help buy a new building for the Shakespeare volumes. If you start to have too much fun, read the New York Times. If the institutional climate is reasonably receptive, all of these things, except for the new building, can be done from an entry-level position as cataloger, for example. And we're working on the new building." (25-26) show less