Tom Gauld at the Texas Book Festival?

Here’s the 2017 Texas Book Festival, taking over the State Capitol grounds on Saturday and Sunday, flooding the area with nationally renowned authors and editors and publishers and so on, the whole madding literary crowd, and, somewhere in the middle of it all: Tom Gauld.

And just who is Tom Gauld?

Why, only the man responsible for You’re Just Jealous of My Jetpack, that’s all. Only the artist who covered the excellent Drawn & Quarterly 25th Anniversary Collection. Only the delightful cartoonist whose brand-new Baking with Kafka is a must-have book for any bibliophile with anything even approaching a sense of humor.

[Note: He's got a few other achievements, yes.]

And, actually, we can’t promise that Gauld will be precisely “in the middle of it all.” Perhaps he’ll be off to one side? Maybe near one mildly trafficked corner? But, in any case, there he’ll be, sitting all British and drolly bearded in some chair upon the tree-lined lawn, faintly smiling among copies of his superlative books – books that often skewer, albeit somewhat gently and always with an insider’s precision, world literature and the world of literature and all the odd habits of authors and readers and, oh, what was that phrase we used earlier? The “whole madding literary crowd,” was it? And now we’ve used it again.

RECYCLING IN ACTION, PEOPLE! SAVING THE PLANET!

*cough*

Erm … where were we? Oh yes: Gauld, Thomas. Sterling fellow. With one hell of a fine volume from D&Q, that new Baking with Kafka. A bookish graphic anodyne for these digitized and clickbaity times. Highly recommended, to be sure.

So you’ll go to the Texas Book Fest. Maybe you’ll go both days – but Gauld will definitely be there on Sunday. You’ll approach his table. You’ll greet him with a bright Texas “Howdy!” and tell him that you saw his stuff mentioned in The Austin Chronicle, your favorite local source for arts-related news and opinion …

And, O book-loving citizen, YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.