The Czechs came in the mail (yes, yes, every joke about Czech is how it sounds like “check”. The world is that simple.)

Classic finds

The books I ordered from the Czech Republic arrived yesterday. They took two months to get here, but that’s fine – shipping that isn’t slow isn’t cheap. These books are 2007-2008 translations of Love is Walking Hand in Hand. Happiness is a Warm Puppy, and Educating Peanuts. If you don’t recall that last title, don’t be surprised; it was a British book which took comments about school from the strip, making an image-and-a-line book similar to the other two books shown. The book does included the note that “in some cases, the captions have been paraphrased from the original wording,” which I find humorous, as I’m pretty sure that in no cases was the original wording in Czech.

One thing that will irritate me about these books is that, while the standard in most places is for the text on a book’s spine to be read from top to bottom, for Czech it is common for the text to start at the bottom and go up. So now every time I see these on my shelves, my brain will spend a second telling me “those books are upside-down!”

If you need some Czech in your collection, this is where I ordered them from.

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 …