The Great American Story of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts Gang!

I got in my copy of The Great American Story of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts Gang!, which is a Ready-to-Read Level Three book that basically fills the same function as the Schulz biographies that are sold as parts of bulk kids biography sets. Having said that, this stands out as enticing version of that; the pages are bright and colorful, Chloe Perkins’s writing is reasonably snappy and mostly accurate (there’s one or two quibbles to be had, but they’re small.) It is utterly bereft of photographs; instead, it’s all UPA Animation-esque drawings by Scott Burroughs with bits of Peanuts strips set in. I could criticize the art in 100 ways (and had fun doing that about the cover a few weeks back), but while it’s not a great capturing of reality, it’s kind of fun on its own silly level. And unlike the other books I compared it to, this is priced for actual purchase, a mere $3.99 in paperback.

This folks reading this blog probably won’t learn anything actually new by reading this book… but by the time you get toward the end, the book has already declared you an “official History of Fun Stuff Expert on Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang”… and even after that, it has more to tell you, like how to draw Charlie Brown, and how animation works by using “persistence of vision” and the “phi phenomenon”.

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 …