When my wife asked for the checkbook, I handed her this
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds, Reviews
I don’t get to add Peanuts books in a new language to the AAUGH.com Reference Library very often any more. After all, once you get books in 21 languages, covering much of the world’s population, it starts getting harder to find ones… and even in these days of online ordering and international shipping, sometimes navigating those foreign sites when all you know is English, one year’s worth of college Spanish, one of high school German, and a few years of totally-forgotten pre-Bar Mitzvah Hebrew gets difficult. But a gift from AAUGH Blog reader Scott, generous beyond anything that is called for, has added a new language to my list.
Šťastný Snoopy is a book in Czech, from the Czech Republic. It’s a tall book… but not nearly so thick as this computer-generated book image from the publisher’s website would have you believe (and in fact it’s so thin that there isn’t even text on the spine.) Šťastný Snoopy (“Happy Snoopy”) reprints all of the 1965 strips up to October 16th, with both dailies and Sundays in black and white. Each page is six dailies, or three dailies and a Sunday. The translated text, done with a computer Schulz font, is set right in the balloons, and while such type never has the life that Schulz’s original hand lettering does, it nonetheless doesn’t look wrong.
I was hoping that I would discover that this was part of some sort of Czech Complete Peanuts attempt, but checking the publisher’s website, it looks like this book from 2014 is the only attempt at such a serial strip reprint. They have a number of other Peanuts books, including several books from the Happiness is a Warm Puppy line, and a couple of books with the curious word “Snoopyho” in the title. And good news for those of you who want to try to order them from the publisher: at the moment, many of their Peanuts books are on sale for up to 2/3s off. This book will run you 35 Koruna, which is about a one-and-a-half US bucks.
Although shopping through on their website, it looks like they might be out of stock on this one. Trying a couple of other books, some are in stock, and some are not. And then I get to the checkout, and I fear I know what’s coming: some of these foreign book sale sites are simple not set up to ship outside of the immediate area. But hey, there’s a drop-down menu for country to ship to, and it has many, many, many countries on it. But no “US” (except in parenthesis after the Virgin Islands), no “United States”. Hmmm, research time… ah, it’s “Spojené Státy Americké”
Looks like shipping on a buck-and-a-half book runs about $15. But let’s try throwing a couple more books in…. and it’s still about $15. So let’s see, the total for the three books I pick is 194 Koruna for the books, 322 for the doprava (shipping), and 90 for balini, which I guess is taxes, but turns out to be packing. The box is worth more than a book!
But that’s less than $27 for three books. On one hand, now I already have a Czech book, do I really need three more? I’m certainly not completist on foreign books. On the other hand, the price is not bad… and they do accept platba kartou (card payment). So this is actually possible!
Gonna think about this a bit.
