Books
In addition to books about comics and children's books, Walker has collected his strips into 92 "Beetle Bailey" paperbacks and 35 "Hi and Lois" paperbacks, plus writing his autobiography, Mort Walker's Scrapbook: Celebrating a Life of Love and Laughter.
In his book The Lexicon of Comicana (1980), written as a satirical look at the devices cartoonists use, Walker invented a vocabulary called Symbolia. For example, Walker coined the term "squeans" to describe the starbusts and little circles that appear around a cartoon's head to indicate intoxication. The typographical symbols that stand for profanities, which appear in dialogue balloons in the place of actual dialogue, Walker called "grawlixes."
In 2006, he launched a 24-page magazine, The Best of Times. distributed free throughout Connecticut and available online. It features artwork, puzzles, editorial cartoons, ads and a selection of articles, comics and columns syndicated by King Features. His son, Neal Walker, was the editor and publisher. Between 2006 and 2010, they published 27 issues.
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Famous quotes containing the word books:
“If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.... Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)