The AAUGH blog

Been a slow news period, but it’s about time to do some more flipping through The Peanuts Collection, the upcoming slipcased hardcover look at Peanuts which I provided the text for. We’re up to page 18 here, and this spread is about advertising and Peanuts. The text talks about some of the Peanuts-centered ad campaigns, and also how advertising has actually helped Peanuts. It’s really the visuals that make this spread. There’s an early ad for Peanuts itself, pictures of some MetLife items, some Dolly Madison ad drawings, and some Schulz sketches for Butternut Bread ads. The biggest shot on the spread is a Peanuts ad for the Ford Mustang.

Suddenly, I can hear a few of you attentive folks sharpening your pencils to write me a corrective email, letting me know that I obviously meant Ford Falcon, as that was the car the Peanuts characters advertised. So let me cut you off by pointing out two things: 1) pencils are a really lousy way to write email, and 2) no, I actually mean Mustang. I was surprised by this one myself when we found it in the Schulz Museum archives.

But this full-color ad piece for the 1965 Mustang serves a double purpose – it’s also a pocket. Reach into it and you can pull out a reduced reproduction of A Scrapbook about Your Falcon, which you have seen discussed previously on this blog and in my online Museum of Odd Peanuts Books.

The next spread is on Snoopy, filled with the history of everyone’s favorite well-eventually-they-decided-he-was-a-beagle. And this spread has a reduced reproduction of the educational Snoopy’s First Code Book tipped in (“tipped in” being publishing talk for “glued to the page”.)

Then there’s a spread on Peanuts in animation, and immediately after that (and very much linked to it), a spread on Peanuts and Christmas. The text talks a lot about A Charlie Brown Christmas, of course, but the pictures bring in not only that, but Peanuts ornaments, a single cartoon from Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking (a 1963 insert in Good Housekeeping magazine), and a removable greeting card. Now, this isn’t the reproduction of some high-print-run Hallmark card; this was a card which Schulz designed custom for the actor who played Schroeder in the San Francisco cast of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown – so if you don’t have one of its original print run of 100, here’s your change to have it.

We’re not halfway through the book yet, but I best get on to other things. But first, since I’ve been talking about removable items, let me bring up a related topic. I’ve already been facing the question coming in via email “if I buy this book, and send it to you, will you sign it and send it back?” Now, I don’t want people sending whole books through the mail – it’s both too much of a chance of getting damaged, and too much of a hassle on this end. With previous books, I’ve been willing to send out signed bookplates – stickers that you stick on the inside front cover (excuse me, “tip in”), and voila, it becomes a signed copy! But for this book with its removable items, I think it might make more sense for people to send me the removable item and a SASE, and I’d sign it and send it back. The first removable item on page 9 should fit easily into a standard envelope, and that would keep things simple. You can let me know what you think of this suggestion by emailing questions@AAUGH.com .

(It is possible I will be doing some signing appearances for this book, but it is not yet definite. If any are scheduled, I will announce it here.)

If you have a favorite bookstore and want to preorder, the ISBN is 978-0316086103 (US edition), 978-1741730685 (Australian edition), or 978-1-84773-827-1 (UK edition.) For those who like to order from your favorite online sites, here are the links:

• Amazon
• Indybound
• Borders
• B&N

Ah, time to return to our flip-through of my upcoming book, The Peanuts Collection, which the publisher seems to think folks will want — it’s tied for 70th place in terms of print run for books announced for October release. (For those of you not in the book biz – 70th is quite high, there are thousands of books released each moth, and October is a month for big releases, in anticipation of holiday sales.)

We were about to turn to page 10, where we find a page just about Charlie Brown – the first of a series of character-focused pages scattered through the book. On this spread, there are plenty of images, with pictures of Charlie Brown through the years, of Schulz drawing the character, of the character in animated and doll form. And hey, there’s a 1956 letter from the famed Dr. Spock (no, not the Star Trek guy, he was Mr. Spock) to Mr. Schulz (addressed simply as that) about Charlie Brown. But the big thing on this spread is the latest removable reproduction – a Schulz sketch of Charlie Brown, reproduced down to the torn corners of the paper.

Flip the page, and we’re on to a spread about how Peanuts fill lives at playtime… with another removable reproduction, this an 8-page version of a Saalfield coloring book, one of those done using versions of the original strips, with the filled-in blacks hollowed out, as discussed here (although it’s not the same volume.)

As the AAUGH Blogger, I get a fair number of “how can I find such-and-such old Peanuts item?” questions. The one item that I get the most requests for is The Peanuts Book of Pumpkin Carols, a greeting card booklet issued by Hallmark, filled with Halloween parodies of Christmas songs. A reproduction of that is the take-out item on the next spread, which is about Peanuts and Halloween. And for those of you who know that Pumpkin Carols was released in a number of formats over the years, you shold be glad to know we picked a pumpkin-shaped format over one of the more mundane formats.

To wrap up this look, we get to the next character-oriented spread. In this case, Lucy and Linus have to share a spread, which you know isn’t making either of them happy.  To me, the nice surprise image here is a letter to Schulz from Lucy. No, not that Lucy… it’s from that other famous Lucy, the I Love Lucy Lucy.

And then on the next page…. oh, wait, I said I’d stop there. But there is some cool stuff on the next page. I’ll get to that next time.

Those of you who want to buy this book from your local comic book store should let them know now. They can find the book in the current Previews catalog, page 344, item AUG10 1289. If you have a bookstore and want to preorder, the ISBN is 978-0316086103 (US edition), 978-1741730685 (Australian edition), or 978-1-84773-827-1 (UK edition.) For those who like to order from your favorite online sites, here are the links:

• Amazon
• Indybound
• Borders
• B&N

Despite the talk about the upcoming Happiness is a Blanket, Charlie Brown, that’s not the next DVD up. Here are a couple that will be shipping in the next couple months.

• He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown offers up one of the early specials… one that’s already on DVD on the Peanuts 1960′s Collection. However, here it’s paired with Life’s a Circus, Charlie Brown, a 1980 special that’s not out on DVD, plus a documentary featurette about the Redwood Ice Arena, the skating center that the Schulzes had built. This hits in September.
• October brings Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales to market. This is a DVD which was actually available last year, but it was exclusive to the CVS Pharmacy chain. Christmas Tales is a short special, created to round the unedited A Charlie Brown Christmas up to a full TV hour in today’s more-ad-filled TV format. It’s a good special – little short bits about various characters and Chriastmas – but it’s short. It is rounded out with a second special, 1983′s Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown, a rather random pairing. And there’s no documentary featurette to add to the viewing time. So you get a total of 41 minutes of entertainment, but they do price it lower than their other DVDs due to this. And these specials are not on any other currently-available DVD.

Note: I think I’m figuring out why people have been missing some of my posts – it looks like my “put this post up later” system and my “email people who want posts mailed” system don’t play well together. I will try to remember not to use the first, but if you are getting this via email, you may want to add the AAUGH Blog to your RSS reader instead of relying on the email system.

It’s been a few months since I finished my work on the writing and editing of The Peanuts Collection, and it’s still a few months before its in stores… but in the big leagues, they print the books months before they hit the stores. So I’m sitting here with my author copies (including ones bearing the imprint of the US publisher Little Brown, the UK publisher New Holland, and the Australian publisher Cameron House. Really, they’re all the exact same book except for the publisher logo, price, UPC, and copyright page… but you know me, I’d be glad to have these variations even if I weren’t the author!)

Nat Gertler with book

I’ve written a couple dozen books, but this is the first hardcover edition I’ve had… and what a production. It’s not only hardcover – it’s slip-cased! That’s nice on a couple levels. One is that it makes the whole thing feel fancy, but also it means that all the items that are there to convince you to buy the book (the announcement “includes framable prints”, the description of the book,the UPC,  and so forth, are on the slipcase, so the book itself has a cover that’s all a mosaic of Peanuts/Schulz images.

Start flipping through, get past the Table of Contents, and you land on a foreword by Schulz’s daughter, Amy Schulz Johnson, talking about her dad. Then you get a note from the author (that bum!), and then finally you get to the heart of the book. It’s all organized by two-page spreads. The first spread is a bio of Schulz himself – there’s probably not a lot in the text here that will surprise AAUGH Blog readers, but we’ve got some interesting illustrations, including a 1957 letter from Sparky to his syndicate, encouraging them to change the title of his already-popular strip.

The next spread talks about Peanuts on its home ground, the comic strip. Yes, there’s some nice images here, including reproduction of some “Li’l Folk” art you may not have seen before. But it’s on the right-hand page of this spread that you’ll find the first example of what makes this not just an ordinary book, but rather what the marketing people are calling an “interactive” book. Sticking out of a clear pocket is a little brochure marked as The Peanuts Album. This is a reproduction of a giveaway that was offered by some newspapers in the early 1950s, introducing the Peanuts characters, as well as offering up a then-current photograph of the Schulz family. It’s not an item I’d ever seen before starting work on this book, and now I’m glad I have this.

I’m going to stop here on the journey through the book for now. Let me quickly note a few things, though. First off, even though my name is on the cover, I can’t take all the credit for what’s in this book. Really, I was mainly responsible for the words (and even then, there was a lot of feedback and input from a range of folks). There were some editorial folks putting in a lot of effort finding interesting images and objects; I put in my suggestions, naturally, and even provided access to some of my collection, but they found a lot of good stuff that I would’ve missed.

Secondly, I want to reassure all the collectors out there that the reproduction items in here are just that, reproductions, and they’re marked as such. Each has the small word “reproduction” on them, and some are a different size or length than the original item – these reproductions will be identifiable, should anyone try to pass them off as the original items.

Anyway, this book is available for preorder, either by talking to your local shop or by ordering from one of your favorite online sites:

• Amazon
• Indybound
• Borders
• B&N

Coming in February from Running Press Kids is Happiness Is a Blanket, Charlie Brown, which would appear to be an adaptation of a new Peanuts special that the LA Flash animation studio Wildbrain is bringing to life. Is this a direct-to-video or direct-to-iTunes release, or will it see release to the small screen? That’s information I don’t have. As always, I’ll interrupt regular programming whenever news breaks on this critical matter.

Here’s the first visuals of this fall’s upcoming book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas:

The pop-up version

The boxed set of little paperbacks.