DENIS KITCHEN'S CHIPBOARD SKETCHBOOK

Denis Kitchen’s Chipboard Sketchbook (130 6x9-inch pages, b/w mostly with flecks of color; Boom! Town, hardcover, $19.95) might well be called The Book of Boredom. But you won’t be bored: you’ll be vastly amused by this collection of doodles Kitchen committed while bored in bored meetings and other convenings that he was subjected to while running Kitchen Sink Press. To stay awake, he says in the Introduction (the only text in the book, merely five pages of it, and some pages are half illustration), he doodled with a Sharpie pen and Uni-Ball Micro ballpoint on the cardboard backing of tablets of writing paper—what printers call “chipboard.”

Sometimes cartooning is just fun. Fun. And/or funny. And this fugitive from the Kitchen is instance of this happy confluence. Greg Sadowski’s design results in the entire content being printed on paper that strenuously resembles chipboard, so we get the authentic experience of seeing Kitchen’s pictures in their native habitat.

The entire sordid story of Kitchen and his Sink Press is related in copious detail the Usual Place in Harv’s Hindsight for September 2009, should you want to re-acquaint yourself with it for the sake of deeper appreciation of the whole Kitchen enchilada.