How apropos that the Fauquier (Va.) Times-Democrat asked an electronics engineer to review the Complete Cartoons—after all, most of the cartoons aren't in the book itself but on the two CDs tucked inside the front cover. The reviewer, Keith Selbo, kvetches:

The companion CDs don't offer the comforting look and feel of a book, but they have the decided advantage of being searchable by author and date. Anyone looking for a favorite cartoonist or having a bent for research will welcome these computer-age features. Unfortunately, they come at a price.

Either as a cost-cutting measure, or possibly to protect Web reprint sales, the CD cartoon images were scanned at sub-par resolution. For the most part, this doesn't overly diminish the viewing experience or the humor. Unfortunately, there are a few cases where meaning hinges on some minute visual nuance that doesn't quite show up on the screen. The software zoom feature fails to reveal the lost detail, only a jumble of pixels. The joke is lost.

That's troubling. I haven't run into this yet myself—the resolution looked pretty good to me—but I can imagine that when the detail gets truly tiny it might be a problem. Still, as Selbo concedes, it's hard to get more Booth for your buck than in this collection, for those who think about the world this way. He's also right about the relatively cold comfort—for those unaccustomed to data CDs, it's hard to conceive of more than sixty-six thousand drawings living in those two silver discs, like the flat pools to strange worlds in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew. And yet, once Acrobat is working properly (I had to install the latest version, helpfully included on the CD), one can relax; there they are, all the cartoons you wanted but were afraid to buy from the Cartoon Bank, or didn't know exactly what you were looking for.

But I think Selbo's dismissal of the "fawning reminisces by such notables as John Updike and Lillian Ross" is too harsh. They are light—but then, so are many of the cartoons.

A Bargain at Twice the Price [Fauquier Times-Democrat]
The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons [Powell's]
Bob Mankoff: From New Yorker contributor to savvy businessman, the cartoonist banks on his entrepreneurial skills [Planet Cartoonist]
No, the computers are up. WE'RE down. [Warren Miller, Cartoon Bank]