This book is very awesome.

Either you like this or you hate it. Chris Ware's art I think is absolutely beautiful. The stories are utterly depressing. I really enjoyed both Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories. This is a collection of stories his comic book (I think). But with all sorts of incredibly small print!!! My favorite quote--"Already herein, I believe lies one of the principles of the ACME method: viz., regardless of quality, integrity, or intellect, even the most rudimentary veneer of perfection can provide some consoling frivolity in the face of a wholly depraved essence -- i.e., even if a product, or service is utterly without redeeming value or integrity , it may still be made presentable, and conceivably sold-- or at least repackaged --at a considerable profit."
This is one paragraph on a page filled with small print which you must constantly turn the book, an oversized book, around to read. If you don't think that is funny, Well! maybe this is not the book for you.
Just read it again (August, 2014). Utterly depressing!

The Acme Novelty Library:
Satire and irony infused into a blatant critique of American consumerism.
Quimby the Mouse cracked me up.
If you're not looking close enough you could easily miss the hilarity of images such as the mock photograph of, "All-night Unwed Mother and Discarded Child Ice Cream Party. Sept 22nd 2000. Chicago Warehouse."

the largest book i own. it was a gift to me!

This shit is off-the-charts crazy.

Why Chris Ware has not won a MacArthur Award, I don't know. I can't wait until the entire Rusty Brown odyssey is finished. If only I had a brain like his...

The beautiful book cover lured me in, but I was first amazed,and then disappointed when I opened the book. (It was sealed when I purchased it.)

It’s actually a series of comic strips from the author, but there’s very little I found funny in this volume. Mostly I found it depressing.

This collection had a completely different mood than what I expected, I think I would have liked it better if I had read it before some other stuff by Chris Ware (before this I read Building Stories and Floyd Farland, Citizen Of The Future) I enjoyed it very much but it felt very gloomy, so I took my time to go through it all. The pages full of tiny texts and fake advertisements were fun at first and then overwhelming - it's pretty difficult to read it all and specially hard if you've been "relaxed" reading comics with less text. It's not that I don't understand it, even if it went into heavy topics, it was just too much.

But anyway, Chris Ware's style is something that I enjoy and I particularly love how this book (with its pages beautifully printed in pretty big format) even had a small comic strip on the edge of the front and back covers.

This is an intense and interactive read, which carries that delightful melencholic blend of corportate verbage and depression that F C Ware is so darn good at producing.

Around the beginning of the year, I was on a graphic novels kick, set off by a customer selling my bookstore several volumes of fairly rare books by Chris Ware, including several volumes of his Acme Novelty Library, and a published version of his surprisingly chaotic and vulgar sketchbook (several of which I promptly bought as belated Christmas gifts), and by my discovery of Joe Sacco and Guy Delisle. I am a pretty big fan of Ware, and enjoyed these graphic novels for the most part (especially the opening story in volume 19, which is one of Ware’s best pieces), but I struggled, and sometimes failed, to get through his “Quimby the Mouse” pieces, and only got a few pages into the “Quimby the Mouse” collection we received.

This book is a collection of material taken from Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library volumes, a Best Of if you will, packed with standout selections from his various ongoing comic strips as well as all the fine-print-in-the-margins hilarity you would expect from such a volume with Ware's name on it. Some may find the fake Acme inserts tedious after a certain point, but I think that's part of the whole joke and dutifully read every word on every publication of Ware's. This oversized hardcover serves as a perfect introduction for the uninitiated, serving up a fantastic variety of Ware's brilliantly bleak explorations of human folly.

Fantastic. Amazing. Beautiful. Funny. Sad.