Last year The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top, my pal Rob Harrell’s nationally syndicated comic strip: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.” Andrews McMeel, the publisher of all the Doonesbury collections, just put out the first-ever collection of Big Top strips. My copy arrived from Amazon this week.

I wrote about Rob a few months ago in one of my first posts. We’ve known each other since middle school, when he was a Bloom County fanatic who amused himself by sketching pneumatic babes and other things in his notebook when he was bored in class. You can read Rob’s daily Big Top strips at ucomics.com.

Also received from Amazon this week: a copy of Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. I’ve owned a xerox of this clever and hilarious book for about 20 years, but I’ve never owned a copy of the actual book. Oddly, my new copy has the appearance of a cheap bootleg: Both the cover and the pages inside were obviously reproduced from a mediocre photocopy of an earlier edition, not from the original plates. Given that the publisher is Penguin, this is kind of surprising. But I’ll be glad to replace my own tattered photocopy with something I can actually file away on a bookshelf.