Heather Smith has posted a witty piece on Bookslut about the recent vogue for deluxe, multi-volume, hardcover collections of old comic strips, which she traces back to Fantagraphics and its Seth-designed Peanuts volumes. As Smith concedes, many of these collections are quite lovely and are enormously appealing to adult collectors, but she wonders what will become of the children who first encounter these old strips in such reputable formats.

Pardon me while I get out my corncob pipe and reminisce here, but in my day, comics were cheap. Skinny paperbacks like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circle were four for a dollar at ubiquitous used bookshops. […] What would it be like, as a kid, to first encounter comics in a format that suggests that comics are actually important? […] The tide of comics as something endlessly disposable is receding before our very eyes, and as we look ahead, the future looks suspiciously like a fluttering mountain range of sewn bindings and velveteen ribbon bookmarks. So how is this strange thing called “dignity” conveyed? Does a velveteen bookmark a classic make? Are we ready for the deluxe leatherette edition of Beetle Bailey?

After expounding further on the topic, Smith takes a closer look at the relative value of several recent collections, including the aforementioned Peanuts volumes, Hank Ketchum’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1954, The Complete Far Side 1980-1994, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven.

The summer issue of Bookforum features a lengthy piece entitled “Reflections,” in which numerous novelists weigh in on the experience of having their books adapted into feature films. You can read the article here.

Elmore Leonard talks about his attempts to adapt one of his own early works, Glitz; Tracey Chevalier talks about the surreal experience of seeing a crew of hundreds transpose Girl with a Pearl Earring to celluloid; Patrick McGrath recounts how David Cronenberg kept pushing him to whittle a screenplay of his Spider down to a bare-bones outline; Barry Gifford reveals how two lines from his novel Night People became the basis for David Lynch’s Lost Highway; and, most fascinating of all, Frederic Raphael argues that Eyes Wide Shut was ruined when Stanley Kubrick threw out too much of his screenplay, which was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle.

The article also includes mini-essays by Michael Tolkin, Jerry Stahl, Susanna Moore, Tim Krabbe, Irvine Welsh, Myla Goldberg, and directors James Ivory and Alexander Payne.