AAUGH.com Newsletter: Peanuts situations

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IN THIS EDITION:
*Honoring Schulz
*Peanuts: A Golden Celebration available and discounted
*The big comic page tribute
*Books added
*AAUGH.com reorganized
*Featured item: A Charlie Brown Celebration
*Strange Peanuts book
HONORING SCHULZ: The public response to the passing of Charles Schulz has been heart-warming. People are finding many venues to talk about this man and what his work has meant to them.

I’ve been contacted by someone close to the family, who wanted me to let everyone know that the family knows that the support for them is out there at this trying time. He also wanted me to say that, while they understand the instinct to send flowers and gifts, the family would prefer that the money be donated to one of Schulz’s favorite charities: The National D-Day Memorial Foundation P.O. Box 77 Bedford, VA 24523 Mark the envelope "In Memory of Charles Schulz." (For those who want another charity to support, Schulz also backed Canine Companions For Indepence, an organization that provides helper dogs for people with disabilities. Donations can be mailed directly to any of CCI’s locations or charged over the phone by credit card by calling (800) 572-BARK.)

PEANUTS: A GOLDEN CELEBRATION IS BACK Apparently, someone is on the ball, as supplies of Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, which ran out earlier today, were quickly replenished. As I type this, copies are available for ordering at 30% off the cover price. I CANNOT GUARANTEE THAT THIS WILL CONTINUE. Availability of this book was disrupted by the unexpected retirement announcement months ago, and now have been disrupted again. My suggestion: if you want one of these, head over to http://AAUGH.com *right now*. Click on the picture of the cover to order the book; if the book is out again, the next page that appears will tell you so. (Peanuts: A Golden Celebration is the 50th anniversary book, a big thick retrospective of almost the entire run of the strip. It has commentary from Schulz…
although if you have the 25th anniversary book Peanuts Jubilee, you already have the same commentary. This book is a great one for the coffee table, and makes a fine gift. Buy lots!)

THE BIG COMIC PAGE TRIBUTE Mark May 27th on your calendar, and pick up all the different newspapers you can on that day. (Okay, you can skip the New York Times.) Almost every syndicated cartoonist in the country will be doing a tribute to Peanuts in their strip that day. This has been planned for a while, and was meant to be a surprise, to coincide with the National Cartoonist Society honoring Schulz. This is something worth looking forward to.

BOOKS ADDED There hasn’t been any truly new books out lately, except for the price guides I talked of last time (both available on the Books About Peanuts page.) However, I have added Cartooning Basics, a guide to drawing characters that Schulz wrote a foreword for. It’s on the Schulz Illustrations page. And I corrected the faulty link for the Cathy book Another Saturday Night Of Wild And Reckless Abandon, also with a Schulz foreword. (This same foreword was reused in The New Collected Cathy
AAUGH.com REORGANIZED If you head to the site today, you might see that a few things have changed. The front page is in black at the moment. That will only be for a week, because I think a Peanuts site should be about joy, not sorrow. There are some other changes as well. I’ve eliminated the Coming Soon page, the Foreign Books page and the Original Books page; available books from those pages have been integrated into other pages. The Buy Books Now link has been replaced with one marked Check Out, to make it clearer what it does. And I’ve added a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list for the site (separate from the FAQ for the collector’s guide), to handle some questions that I commonly get (and a few which I suspect people may be thinking but not asking.) If you have any ideas for ways to improve AAUGH.com, let me know.

FEATURED ITEM: A CHARLIE BROWN CELEBRATION
This issue’s featured item is an interesting video called A Charlie Brown Celebration. This is the tape of an animated special which first aired in 1982. On it, Schulz talks about the characters, leading to animated sequences based directly on strip sequences. The special was originally an hour long, but that includes commercials, so the videotape version is about 48 minutes long. You can find this video tape on the front page of http://AAUGH.com , in the little area on Video Retrospectives.

STRANGE PEANUTS BOOK
For the Peanuts book collectors out there, I thought I’d start sharing information about the stranger items in my own 600 piece collection. This time, I’m taking a look at an uncommon edition of Security Is A Thumb And A Blanket. Many of you collectors probably have a copy of Security Is A Thumb And A Blanket, but for those who don’t: it’s one of a series of small square books issued in the 1960s by Determined Productions. Each two-page spread in these books contains a platitude ("Security is having a home town") and a matching picture (Linus hugging a sign that says "Pinetree Corners, Population 3260.") So what’s special about this edition? It’s in Braille. The American Brotherhood For The Blind made this special version by taking a standard copy of the book, cutting apart the pages, and adding in the middle of each two page spread a pair of thick plasticy pages. One page has the platitude text in Braille, the other page has a raised version of the picture, so that a blind person can feel it. They even add texture to certain items. The whole thing is designed to be held together with spiral binding, although on the copy I have the spiral has apparently come off, and it’s held together with three binder rings. Don’t bother asking where you can get this. They made this over three decades ago, and I doubt they made very many of them to begin with. As you can imagine, I’m sure not willing to part with mine. But if you stick with Peanuts book collecting long enough, you’re likely to come across a few weird things yourself!
Well, that’s it for this newsletter. Because the Peanuts book situation is in such a flux, I expect to continue issuing these more often than our usual one-per-month. Let’s hope that if there’s any unexpected news, it will be good this time. Meanwhile, if you like this newsletter, and you like my site, be sure to tell your friends about http://AAUGH.com (and feel free to forward this email to them!)

–Nat Gertler Proprietor AAUGH.com

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