Schulz bios for the schoolkids, again

Well, 2004 is over, and what a year it was for the Peanuts book fan! Between the first two volumes of The Complete Peanuts, the Schulz Museum’s Li’l Folks collection, and It’s Only A Game, there was a tremendous amount of vital Schulz material hitting your bookshelf for the first time! The new year will bring us a couple more volumes of The Complete Peanuts, of course, so there is still much to look forward to.

I just realized that back in July, I promised a review of the Robbie Reader biography of Schulz, and never delivered. This is yet another volume aimed at school libraries. Author Barbara Marvis (a writer who specializes in “non-fiction for middle-grade at-risk readers”) did go a bit more in-depth than some of the other bios, but it’s still very much a grade school book and won’t be of much interest to anyone beyond that. Still, she got her facts reasonably in order, putting her above some of the other authors. The book has roughly a thousand words, plus about a dozen large photos, a timeline, a brief index, a glossary with half a dozen terms, a selected biography, and a list of other works to turn to in order to find out more — three books, all of which are also school library bios, and some of which are much less informative than even this brief book. This one doesn’t set the bar too high, but it reaches its goals, I suppose.

But hey, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t find some little aggrevation to pick apart, so here I am at my picayune best: the book constantly mispunctuates Li’l. We get references to L’il Folks and L’il Abner. Grrrr. It bothers me when they don’t bother getting the li’l things right.

And speaking of Schulz bios for kids, the First Biographies one is now shipping. Needless to say, there is a copy zooming its way to AAUGH.com headquarters, and a review (and possibly some small snide comments) is forthcoming.

Classic finds
English Phrases to Comfort Your Heart

The next book in my Amazon Japan shipment falls into the adorable category of “Peanuts used to explain American culture”. English Phrases to Comfort Your Heart with Snoopy by Nobu Yamada falls into that category. It also falls into the category of “books which are meant to be destroyed”, as each …

New releases
Look! A mook!

Mooks – that is, items with magazine-like content but sold more like a book – are popular in Japan. Many of them come bundled with extra items, and there have been a fair number with Peanuts items. Most often these are bags – a handbag or a tote of some …

New releases
Bringing up the rear

I’m interrupting my coverage of the shipment of books I got from Japan to cover another foreign book that just arrived. Now, I don’t try to collect every foreign Peanuts book. My collection is out of control as it is. I try to find books in languages that I don’t …