Cartoonist Tom Gauld has us laughing with the librarians

For the last 17 years, Tom Gauld has been quietly making jokes about books, bringing contentment to himself and his readers.

Every week, his work appears in the Books section of The Guardian, the British institution that styles itself as the newspaper for progressive thinkers, so Gauld is often thinking about books, their writers, their readers and more. Every week, he seeks a balance of silliness and seriousness, cleverness and easy accessibility for the reader, and it’s entertaining to note who he targets. Jane Austen, for example, may have been dead for 205 years, but she’s fair game for Tom Gauld.

Chatting during a visit to Toronto to promote “Revenge of the Librarian,” his latest collection of four years’ worth of cartoons, Gauld explains.

“Even if you’ve never read a Jane Austen novel, you will know the basics and what will happen in one,” he says. “A lot of my cartoons are about the difference between what’s in the cartoon and the reader’s idea of that thing. It’s confounding their expectations.”

Gauld is an interesting character but, it must be said, he probably wouldn’t confound the expectations of anyone who’s seen his work. With mild manners and a soft English accent that occasionally gives away his early years in Scotland, he’s a terribly nice man with a gentle wit that’s never cruel, and he avoids things that might affect his peace of mind, such as social media.

He calls his approach to his work “gentle subversion,” which is easy to find in “Revenge of the Librarians,” and the four other collections of cartoons and two original graphic novels from Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly.

In one cartoon, for example, there’s a wintry scene of snowman-building, plus a novelist sitting off to the side because he first wants to create a detailed backstory for his snowman. Another gag strip shows a publisher’s office with a fancy new computer ready to create the ideal bestseller; the outcome is, of course, a word salad of modern trends and nonsense. Or try the hilarious and perfect cartoon entitled “Waiting for Godot to join the Zoom meeting.” Sometimes we get little anthropomorphic books, too, walking around on little legs to make a comment about something in publishing. It’s delightful.

Gauld is determined to make comics that appeal to everyone, especially the people who don’t read comics. Like any cartoonist, he’ll attack pretension, and for that, his work is in the right spot. “Sometimes the book pages in the Guardian can be a little bit highbrow,” he chuckles. “I like to treat literary fiction as a genre that can be made fun of — sometimes we can look at it in a different way.” Let’s look for confirmation at the cartoon called “Halloween costumes for pretentious children,” especially the kid dressed as “the dead tree that gives no shelter from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”.” Absolute brilliance.

The material is accessible, although Gauld is pleased when people get an obscure reference, and he enjoys including nods to his own interests, like science fiction. “I think I’m still slightly the kid that I was, who spent a lot of time lying on the ground quietly in the corner of the room, drawing, while the world went on around me,” he says.

“Every week, I have this space in the Guardian which I see as a little hole that I need to fill with something interesting. This is my 17th year doing it so I’m always trying not to repeat myself and find something interesting to put in that hole. Sometimes it’s a traditional piece set in the book world and sometimes it’s not even a joke. It’s a structure that I try to make as amusing as I can.”

Musing on that weekly task and how inspiration may come — unsurprisingly, Gauld spends a lot of time in coffee shops, drinking in the hubbub and lost in his thoughts — he says he has “a lovely job.” He lives in north London with his wife and two teenage daughters, and likes to keep work and home separate, so he commutes to a studio he shares with two other artists. Intimates tell him he should have more hobbies but he’s happiest with a sketch pad.

He tried and tried again to get into The Guardian: in 2002 he took his portfolio and pitched to the art director in the parking lot. Initially unsuccessful, he was soon hired for some illustrations, and then a fill-in for established cartoonist Posy Simmonds, which Gauld described as “completely terrifying.” That progressed into the current gig, which made him a household name, although that depends on the household. Being “famous” for cartooning, he references graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, is like being a famous badminton player.

That doesn’t mean he lacks ambition. Gauld is about to embark on a new graphic novel as a follow-up to his previous works, “Mooncop” and “Goliath.” These longer books bring their own challenges, of course, and Gauld views it as harder than making weekly cartoons. “I want to be making pages, not spending two years thinking about whether it’s a good idea.”

It is a good idea. His previous books are as strong as his cartoons, although their storytelling is more of a slow burn. “Goliath” is the story of a giant who has to fight but would prefer a desk job, while “Mooncop” shows us a lonely existence on the Moon. Both are deeply affecting and keep the reader thinking, long after the book is closed. These are quiet books, much like their creator, and the world deserves more of them.

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