The theme for today is "Putting It Together," a collection of collections assembled during the year.

From the home front

"Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami" (Bayeux, $14.95) was edited by Pittsburgh writers and poets Judith Robinson, Joan Bauer and Sankar Roy. They are also among the 80 contributors to the book from countries around the globe.

Inspiring the collection was the December 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Indian Ocean nations. Royalties are going to various disaster relief funds including those helping Hurricane Katrina survivors.

There are three readings from the anthology scheduled here:

Oct. 19 -- Society for Contemporary Craft, 2100 Smallman St., Strip District, 7 p.m.

Oct. 22 -- Squirrel Hill Branch, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 1 p.m. A panel discussion on "Can Poetry Help Heal the World" is included.

Nov. 30 -- Barnes & Noble, Waterfront outlet, 7 p.m.

The Web site, www.poetsfor humanity. com, has more information.

Autumn House, the independent press started by Michael Sims on Mount Washington to publish poetry, has just released "The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry" edited by Sue Ellen Thompson ($29.95).

It's a wide-ranging assortment of the latest work from local and national poets.

Autumn House has also published this year "Collected Poems" by Patricia Dobler, introduced by Jean Valentine ($19.95).

The late poet was the longtime director of the Madwomen in the Attic writing group and was to head the graduate writing program at Carlow University before her death last year.

Samuel Hazo, whose International Poetry Forum opened its 39th season last week, collected his prose pieces in "The Power of Less: Essays on Poetry Public Speech" (Marquette University Press, $17).

And elsewhere

After mining the coffers of its cartoons in a series of themed collections, the New Yorker magazine has finally said, "Oh, what the heck," and compiled every issue into "The Complete New Yorker" on eight DVDs and a companion book (Random House, $100).

It claims everything is here -- covers, cartoons, ads -- and the package is already being touted as a super Christmas gift.

Updates of subsequent issues will be provided as time moves on.

Last year, the magazine did the same thing for every cartoon.

Another New Yorker collection is just out -- "Honky Tonk Parade: New Yorker Profiles of Show People" by John Lahr (Overbrook Press, $27.95).

Among them is Lahr's interview with the late August Wilson that was published in 2001 and contains new gleanings on his childhood and father.

Norton published the complete Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle annotated by Leslie S. Klinger last year in time for gift-giving.

This year, it's offering the four Holmes novels -- "A Study in Scarlet," "The Sign of the Four," "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Valley of Fear" -- in a handsome slip-cased edition also with Klinger's comments. The package goes for $49.95.

The Library of America continues its fine series on American writers with a two-volume collection of James Agee's writing. The first includes "Now Let Us Praise Famous Men," including the Walker Evans photos, "A Death in the Family" and short fiction ($36). The second compiles his film criticism, journalism and book reviews largely written in the 1940s and early '50s and his screenplay for "Night of the Hunter," that unique slice of American gothic cinema directed by Charles Laughton, his only directing credit ($40).

"The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry" is edited by Arnold Rampesad (Oxford University Press, $32.50). The poets and their works are grouped by theme.

The comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" lasted 10 years until Bill Watterson pulled the plug in 1995. Now comes "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" (Andrews McMeel, $150) in a three-volume set. The Post-Gazette is among a collection of newspapers re-running some of the strips until the end of the year.

Poet James Wright, the Martins Ferry, Ohio, native, was an inveterate letter writer as well. His letters to a wide range of fellow poets and others are collected in "A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright" edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $40).