A choice of stocking-fillers

There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing something for people to buy for other people who would rather have been given something else. Having produced one or two of the things myself, I suspect that most Christmas books aren’t even opened, let alone read. And possibly for good reason, because the majority of them are crushingly mediocre. Here, though, are a few that are really rather good.

Big beast among the cartoon books this year is Mrs Weber’s Omnibus (Jonathan Cape, £20), the collected Guardian strips of Posy Simmonds. It’s beautiful and it replaces several battered large-format paperbacks I now realise I lost years ago. But it’s about time publishers treated our best cartoonists with the respect they deserve. These are the cartoons with which Simmonds made her name, starting in 1977 (when she was a complete unknown) and tiptoeing gently through the 1980s, satirising the north London soft-left middle classes as they struggled to adapt to changing times.

George Weber was that now-vanished creature, a liberal studies lecturer at a polytechnic, fluent in structuralist babble and sporting a moustache so droopy it was already out of fashion when he grew it. His wife Wendy was the earth mother, forever cooking quiches for street parties and worrying about her six children, which dates it just a little. But while what George would call the cultural signifiers have changed utterly, social comedy this well-observed never fades. The book encompasses half a dozen of Simmonds’ previous collections and adds a couple of short series that previously didn’t make it into book form.