A reminder about Spread The Love, our membership drive. Sign up seven new Unshelved subscribers by the end of September and we'll send you a postcard with your favorite character hand-drawn by me, and signed by me and Gene!

Last week, we blogged about how you could help move the proposed Unshelved Answers replacement forward, and many of you followed and voted. Thanks!

Now the proposal has moved to the Commitment phase. This means you personally commit to using the site - asking and answering questions - for a set period of time. As of writing this, the proposal has 11% of the commitments it needs to move to the beta phase. (There is not a set number needed, as they are weighted by a user’s reputation across the Stack Exchange sites. But because most of us don’t use Stack Exchange much, we’re going to need a lot of people.)

So please:
1. Go to the proposal.
2. Click Commit! in the upper left-hand corner of the page.
3. Supply your name, email, and a reason, as asked.

On behalf of all Unshelved Answers users, thanks again.

Perhaps you remember Brian Brown, who drew a great Unshelved Book Club of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. Yesterday he launched his new comic strip Everything Dies, "a series of comics about religion as myth throughout the world". I love it. It's already on my list of RSS feeds.

This year's Banned Books Week begins September 25. To help you celebrate, any order from the Unshelved Store containing a Read Irresponsibly shirt or Intellectual Freedom Fighter shirt or bag gets a free mini poster pack, which includes posters of both designs. This offer starts immediately and ends, like the week it's designed to celebrate, on October 2.

Albert Whitman, & Co.