A couple of weeks ago, I snuck out of a cartoon festival and wandered into an ancient bookshop called Un Livre pour Voyage.
It was in a small village called Limoges. (A town, really, but I’ve seen Subway stops bigger than this place.) It was the kind of bookstore that appears to have been there forever. The owner, too. Bound Bibles stacked to the ceiling. Yellowed newspapers. Old cartoon magazines. First edition Asterix and Tintin in the original French. Spiderwebs strung between shelves like Peter Parker had a dust-induced sneezing fit.
It was silent in there. A deep, vacuum of space silence. All that paper soaks up the sound. And it smelled incredible, the way only old books do.
Emily asked the owner, “What’s your oldest book?” He disappeared into the back and came out holding one from 1636.
No white gloves. No glass case. He just handed it over, and we flicked through it like a magazine at the dentist. Someone set those words in type nearly four hundred years ago, and there we were, two tourists, reading them over a Negroni-adjacent afternoon.
That’s the thing about books that I really love. They’re the closest thing we have to time travel. They’re how a person who’s been dead for centuries can still talk to you. Transmitting their thoughts- writing them, drawing them, making them. It’s all we’ve got as a species to outlast ourselves.
I loved this dusty old bookstore. A mausoleum of thoughts.
…Which brings me to a much less ancient book:
On Tuesday, Scott Dooley and I release You’re Not a Real Parent Until…, more than 100 hand-drawn New Yorker-style cartoons about the good, the bad and the sticky of raising tiny humans. Babies, toddlers, teens, adults. The whole gooey, noisy, chaotic arc.
The central idea is simple: nobody really knows what they’re doing. There’s no correct way to parent. There’s just you, three hours of sleep, and a child who has decided the chicken suit was a mistake. (See photo. Scott is laughing. His son is not.) Join us live: Tuesday at noon, right here on Substack.
Scott is a parent. I am not. This is what qualifies us to write and draw about this topic. We wrote this thing with a lot of love. We’re going to be sharing a lot with you this week about how we made this thing...
Scott and I will be drawing, talking and taking your questions. Come tell us your parenting stories, your book stories, the moment you realised you were a real parent. The more you share, the better it gets.
Get the book here, with a sketch of your kid: You’re Not a Real Parent Until…
See you Tuesday.
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spread
Oh! that bookstore looks AMAZING, thank you for sharing...
Coolest on two levels--your birth announcement for your book and that ancient bookstore! Hope you picked up some comics...