It's a Small World Department: Adrian Tomine in Mile End

I thought the name was familiar when I checked the masthead in The New Yorker to see who had done the brilliant cover, Shelf Life. “Adrian Tomine” said something to me, as the saying around here goes. And then when I was running errands on the weekend I saw the posters again. The neighborhood is plastered for his reading and appearance tonight (Tuesday, February 25) at the Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore, 211 Bernard West (two blocks east of Park Avenue.)

What I hadn’t put together is that Tomine is published by Drawn and Quarterly Press, an edgy and quite successful graphica publisher based in Montreal. It opened the bookstore about 18 months on the edge of Mile End. (There are now three independent bookstore in a two block area: besides D + Q, the excellent used bookstore S.W. Welch and the delightful French librairie L’Écume des jours are on the street south, Saint-Viateur.)

Tomine will be at D + Q at 7 p.m. tonight. Thursday February 28, he’ll be in Cambridge, MA at 6 p.m. in the Brattle Theater, an event co-sponsored with Harvard Bookstore. Then it’s on to Providence, RI on Friday, February 29, at 7:00 PM. in the Rhode Island School of Design auditorium . The week following he’ll be in Washington, D.C, on Wednesday, March 5, at 7:00 PM. at Politics & Prose.

That's terrific. With that kind of interest his books are likely to have a good, long shelf life, and are unlikely to end up being burned as in his New Yorker cover, or at S.W. Welch.