Someone in this world knows how to make this AAUGH Blogger happy.
Coming in November is the Peanuts Holiday Box Set, which almost certainly will include a book adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas, probably reprinting the Running Press adaptation.
But better than that, the same month brings… A Charlie Brown Christmas POP-UP!!!
(For those of you who are new around here: this is the local obsession.)
Neither is available for Amazon pre-orders yet; we’ll let you know when they are!
First off, thanks to all of the AAUGH Blog readers who sent in suggestions about how I can get the scent of smoke out of my Braille edition of Home Is On Top Of A Doghouse (various suggestions of laundry products, baking soda, and exposure to sun). I do now have it in a bag with a couple fabric softener sheets; we shall see how that does.
Anyway, the DVD of the animated special You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown is now out, and yes, I was able to verify that I am indeed in the documentary featurette. So for all of you who collect DVDs on the basis of whether Nat Gertler appears in them, you can buy this one with confidence (or avoid it, if that’s how you segment your collection). For the other 99.99999998% of humanity (i.e., those who are not my mother), you can buy it with the confidence that it is indeed an animated Peanuts special.
I scored myself one of the TwinVision books, which are versions of the Happiness is a Warm Puppy series of books with braille pages and raised versions of the images inserted, for blind Peanuts fans. This time I got a copy of Home is on Top of a Doghouse, and it’s in very nice condition – the original comb binding, not missing any of the braille pages, and generally a nice thing to both look at and feel.
But not smell.
This book has clearly been stored in the home of a heavy smoker, and the thick paper has absorbed the stale odor of every cigarette. I’ve closed it up back in a plastic bag. The odor is so strong that I don’t dare put it unprotected with my other Peanuts books, in fear that the scent will infect other books.
That’s life buying used books online!
So the other day, we had a “French book day” here at the AAUGH.com skyscraper, with two separate shipments of French books arriving, each representing some triumph.
Back in 1968, Hallmark issued a cool little quartet of strip collections called The Peanuts Philosophers (soon to be reprinted, as it happens), and matched it with Spanish, Latin, and French sets for the US market, all translated by the famed (well, famed for a linguist) Mario Pei. For some reason, the French books have been particularly elusive to me, so I was happy to score not only the complete set, but the boxed set version.
The other shipment was my copies of Les Jeunes Selon Schulz, the French edition of Schulz’s Youth, the book I published presenting Schulz’s single-panel cartoons for the Christian press. This is the first foreign language edition to arrive, although copies of the Italian edition should now be headed my way, and I expect the Spanish edition to be out later in the year. The French publisher, Vertige Graphic, produced a good, solid hardcover.
The National Cartoonist Society have put together a charity auction to help a family having particular trouble… and they have a piece of Peanuts art for sale.
And this piece is bugging me. It’s familiar… but I can’t tell you where its from. Folks want to be absolutely certain it’s Schulz, and that would be easier if I could point out where it’s from. So go, take a look, and if you know where it’s from, email me at questions@AAUGH.com and let me know. (And hey, if you have a copy of The Women’s Sports Foundation Cookbook, check that one for me, please; I can’t put my hands on my copy of that at the moment, and this would be a logical spot illo in there, although it looks to me like it’s an earlier work.)
(And no, I don’t have my copy yet, so I haven’t seen how the documentary featurette came out. I’ll presume I didn’t look too foolish; that’s the magic of editing!)
