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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by the comics, writer and artist Chris Ware, whose new book is the Atmee novelty date book, Volume 3. And this is a collection. It's a sort of sketchbook, a commonplace book.

What I'll ask Chris what to do is, but to give you a flavor of Chris's work, I should say from

the end of the introduction, and I'm going to peer very closely because the writing is tiny.

He says, I fear there is little of interest in the pages which follow to sustain the attention

or even the

tolerance of the average civilian reader. The indulgent repetition of self-doubts, nostalgia

for places and people long gone, to say nothing of it or meaning little to anybody but me.

If there's any lesson to any of this largely indefensible experiment in printed myopia,

it's that perhaps it's best to keep one's mouth shut.

Chris, is that kind of expectation management, as you see it?

Yeah, I guess that's one way of putting it.

It's also an apology.

And the book itself actually is it's a facsimile sketchbook.

I've been keeping a sketchbook ever since I was in art school in the mid-1980s,

and I made the rather tragic mistake of being flattered into allowing it to be published in the

early 2000s by a very nice Dutch publisher friend of mine, and that completely changed the whole nature of the sketchbook

itself, which should be a secret place where you write embarrassing things that nobody else

should ever see. So then all of a sudden the sketchbook became something kind of weirdly public

as I was trying to keep it private. And then I started keeping a second sketchbook, which is a comic

strip diary. So this is,

...