Peanuts with a quilty look

I’ve made some additions to the AAUGH.com reference library.

The least interesting of these is Just Fore Laughs, a collection of various (generally lackluster humorwise and occasionally poorly reproduced) golf-oriented comic strips, including a few Peanuts strips.

The middlest interesting one is The Peanuts Guide to School Days, which is an activity book put out by Scholastic as part of their “Peanuts Club with Charlie Brown & Friends” line. I’m not generally worried about acquiring coloring and activity books. This one, however, uses actualy strips on almost every page, sometimes just to illustrate a topic being discussed (this is a much more academic book than the typical connect-the-dots and do-the-mazes books marketed as activity books), and sometimes as a key part of the activity — word balloons will be left blank to be filled in creatively, or a set of strips will be shown each with a blank balloon and the reader has to figure out which text goes in which strip. Other books in this series include …Guide to Sports and …Guide to the Seasons. Since these all came out in 2003, it looks as though they never get around to any topics that didn’t start with “S”.

Japanese Quilt book coverBut the most interesting of the new additions is a book of pictures of Peanuts quilts and craft items, apparently the catalog of some 2002 Japanese exhibition. There are some very lovely and creative items in here, well-photographed and printed in gloss color, some accompanied by the strips which inspired them. The last 16 of the book’s 104 pages are a black-and-white guide to making some of the items on the earlier pages. I can’t tell you the title of the book, as I don’t read the language… but any of you AAUGH blog readers who are into quilting (and even those who aren’t into it, like me) would like this one. Alas, I can’t tell you where to get it — it was an eBay find for me.

Japanese Peanuts quilt book samples

Still, it will be nice to have something to share with my quilt-loving mother (better than a blanket-hating grandma for sure!) the next time she visits!

Meanwhile, things are a little quiet on the Peanuts book front through AAUGH.com, both in my efforts on the site and on sales (in fact, the most recent order we got wasn’t for a Peanuts book at all, it was a pre-order for the just-announced final Harry Potter book, coming out this summer.) But I’m keeping busy making sure that Schulz’s Youth is as good as I can make it. However, I’m starting to have a thought about how I might best reach my goal of a much richer online guide to Peanuts books with detail on (and a picture of) each book… I might make it a wiki, and allow certain other serious Peanuts book collectors to add information to it when they have the time and inclination. It would be a while before I could get that set up, but at least we wouldn’t have to wait until I could populate it with most of the data before it could be theoretically useful. Just thought I’d let you know what’s up in my mind.

Classic finds
TV Guide revelation

The latest addition to the AAUGH.com reference library is a TV Guide from February, 1980, which features an article about Peanuts, written by Schulz himself. In it, he discusses why some things work in the strip that don’t work in the animated specials, and he manages to do so in a …

Classic finds
Review: Christmas Gift Certificates for You

When I ordered a copy of the 1981 Hallmark Peanuts product Christmas Gift Certificates for You, I reckoned it would be one of those novelty coupon books, each page removable and offering the recipient a walk in the snow, help taking down the tree, or some Peanuts-y equivalent thereof. I …

Classic finds
Wheelnuts

 I just picked up the July 1964 issue of Drag Cartoons, a black and white comics magazine focused not on performative gender-bending as the youth must suspect, but on souped-up autos, including not just drag racers but hot rods as well. Did I pick it up because it had a …