Do you have a lot of animation books? I do. I have way too many.

I guess if I had to make a resolution this year it would be to cut back on buying every animation book I see. I have a massive collection. If an animation book came out in the last ten years, I probably have it. And the thing is, I don’t need them, it’s just impulse now.

But now I’ve gotten to the point where I’m really picky about the books I buy. This is a necessity brought on by the change in times. You see, there used to be a time about ten or fifteen years ago when there wasn’t fifty new animation books released every year. It used to be that when an animation related book came out it was probably pretty good, and worth the fifty bucks you have to spend to get it. Now there’s so many of them, that you have to start judging quality over quantity. Or else you’ll go broke.

The difficult thing about judging that is it can be hard to find a lot of these animation books at your local Chapters or Barnes and Nobles. You have to go to specialty book stores, and pay specialty prices. Either that or buy it blindly off Amazon, where the “Look Inside” feature generously (insert sarcasm here)  shows you the Table of Contents and Index in order to try and entice you to buy. Close, but no cigar…And skimming through the out of print gems before you buy is next to impossible. How often do you think you’ll find one of those at your local used book store? But the library is good sometimes! Too bad you can’t buy those books.

So what do you do? How do you filter? We (animation artists) need some sort of enthusiast to review “art of” books and give us a better glimpse of the books we intend to spend our hard earned money on to make sure we’ll get plenty of eye candy for our dollar. Because the truth is, once you’ve read one animation art of book, you’ve read them all. The same goes for most of the behind the scenes features on DVD. We all get how animated movies are made by now, this is our passion. Tell us something interesting, and specific about the feature you’re writing the book on! That is, if you have to include text. What I’m personally after is lots and lots of glorious art. Great art speaks for itself, and the truly studious get more out of that than words. That’s why I’m in love with the new Disney series on Story and Animation (I wonder what will be next, Layout maybe?).

Now you could go to the specialty stores, find out which ones you just have to have, and then buy them online for much less…OR you could check out this great blog I just discovered: Parka Blogs. This is the enthusiast I was talking about. He’s got a very popular blog where he shows you lots of pictures, and even a virtual skim through video of every book he reviews. He also ranks his favorites, and he’s reviewed a lot of books so far. Next time you’re thinking about buying an animation book, take a look at this blog to see if it’s worth your money. From this blog, I can see that I’m in store for another beautiful art of book filled with Nico Marlet work in The Art of How to Train Your Dragon. It looks like that book might just make the cut onto my Amazon Wishlist.

On top of limiting the amount of books I buy from now on, I’m doing the same for the ones I currently own. I’ve been slowly selling off all the books I don’t absolutely need. I can’t believe how many books I have that I’m just not that impressed with anymore. There’s only a handful of animation books out there that I consider permanent fixtures on my book shelves. These are the magical books that I’ll be able to read year in and year out, and always learn from. The rest are just personal preference, and I’ve narrowed my massive collection down to a half a book case worth of books I just won’t part with. At least not yet. An animation career can take you far and wide, and I’ve heard from many an animation veteran about the difficulty of moving all those books from place to place. A couple boxes is enough for me. I wouldn’t want things to get out of control.

These pictures I’ve been showing you aren’t even my books. My collection is big, but not quite this big. They belong to a friend of mine, one of the aforementioned animation vets, and they represent a fraction of his collection. On one hand, it’s pretty cool. I’d love to nose around and look at the books I don’t have. On the other hand, it inspires me to keep my own library of inspiration to a minimum. That’s a lesson I learned big time when I first started trying to sell some of my books. You never get the money out that you put in. Art books are notoriously expensive, and unless you’ve kept them in brand new condition, people will only pay pennies for them. Next time you go to buy a book, really think about whether or not you have to have it.  Just my two cents.