The AAUGH blog

Ach! I was doing a little research, and discovered that the Schulz prose story was really not original to The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death, as I suggested in this earlier post. Rather, it was an edited-down-for-length version of the story that Snoopy is seen writing in this May 7th, 1989 strip which I had forgotten:

…with this added at the end:

He sat down to write a bestseller. “It was a dark and stormy night….”

So Schulz didn’t really come up with a new prose story for the book. He just plagiarized the writings of a dog! How dare he! The gall! I’ll bet that pooch will have his lawyers on him lickety-…

Oh… wait. Further research here tells me that Snoopy was just a cartoon fictional dog, a figment of Schulz’s imagination, and thus doesn’t have legal stance to sue him. At least not in most states.

Never mind.

I am one shamefaced AAUGH Blogger.

Today I received a copy of a book – not something obscurely old, but something that’s in print now, and has been in print since shortly before this blog launched over a decade ago – with an original piece of Schulz work. No, not a cartoon, not a foreword nor introduction. It’s an original piece of pros fiction, a short story. Very short. The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death is a collection of microfiction, limited to 55 words per tale. A few of the other writer’s names are ones I recognize (Barnaby Conrad, Larry Niven, Norman Lear); most are not, but that may say more about me than about the authors.

Schulz’s tale is entitled “It was a Dark and Stormy Night…”, but it’s not the tale about the door slamming and the maid screaming. It’s an all-new non-Peanuts story. It’s not a lost masterwork, but even so, this is exactly the sort of thing the AAUGH.com book guide  exists to catalogue. So I apologize for having been deficient up until now… but that has been rectified, and the story is now listed on on the guide’s “introductions and illustrations” page… despite being neither an introduction nor an illustration.

Had you gone to see a performance of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown at a theater in the late 1960s, you might have had a chance to get a souvenir program like this one:

…or maybe a souvenir program like this one:

“But wait,” I hear you cry, “they look like the same program. They even have the same poor coloring choice, where to make the top of Snoopy’s head stand out, they make it look like Charlie Brown is hollow and has been cut in half by a pair of scrapbooking scissors!”

And I can certainly understand your confusion – to see the difference, you have to look on the inside. Oh, they both have the same transcriptions of words from the song, the same bios of the people behind the show, the same introductory Schulz note… but while one of them, presumably the original edition, has pages like this…

…with pictures of the original New York cast (yes, that’s Gary Burghoff in the center square), the other edition has picture pages like this…

…which includes pictures not only of the New York cast, but of other casts performing the show around the world.

I’d never seen anyone noting before that there were two editions – although admittedly it is the sort of thing that only a mad collector would care about. I luckily happened to buy a second copy while I was working on my upcoming book The Peanuts Collection. And hey, speaking of The Peanuts Collection, it will actually include sort of a souvenir version of this souvenir program; smaller, and wit fewer pages, but it should be a keen little thing to hold in your hands if you’ve never had one before.

The main reason I bought a second copy was that it came with this:

That’s a playbill from the original run of the show, at the St. Marks Theater in New York. It’s not, alas, from the start of the run – by this time, they’d replaced half the cast, including Burghoff and Bob Balaban. (Burghoff was likely still doing the show, but as part of the Los Angeles cast. That’s what got him out here, which lead to landing the part in M*A*S*H which made him  famous.)

The latest addition to the AAUGH.com Reference Library is not a Peanuts book. Oh, it has the word “peanut” in it, but then it has many words. It’s a copy of The Rainbow Dictionary, from 1947, years before “Peanuts” began. It’s a kid’s dictionary, with simple defiintions (often, really just examples of the word in use), with a couple of each page’s entries accompanied by a color illustration.

Some of you may be familiar with the popular web feature “Garfield minus Garfield“. Well, The Rainbow Dictionary is The Charlie Brown Minus Charlie Brown Dictionary. Originally published in 1973, The Charlie Brown Dictionary, which was available at various times as one thick volume, 6 thin volumes, and eight even thinner volumes, was based on The Rainbow Dictionary, with examples based around Peanuts characters and with Peanuts illustrations (existing material taken from the strip and from the animated specials).

Now, if I really wanted to track the evolution of this dictionary, I need another edition. The Charlie Brown Dictionary was actually  on the second edition of The Rainbow Dictionary, first released in 1959. And the evolution doesn’t end there, as The Charlie Brown Dictionary served as the basis for a couple Chinese editions, which means that some folks overseas looking to learn English are learning specifically those words that were most common in literature for 5-8 year olds, over half a century ago (admittedly, with a few tweaks thirty-some years ago).

And thus the world turns.

Sparky: The Life and Art of Charles Schulz is a biography aimed at the younger set. In terms of the text, it’s a reasonable attempt. It’s certainly a better and fuller biography than those books that come as part of a series of bios sold in bulk to school libraries. There are no revelations here for anyone who has read the grown-up bios of Schulz, of course, but that’s not the goal. The text does oversimplify things emotionally.

Looking at the cover, you’d sense that the book is designed well. Reading it, however, you’ll find that the book is overdesigned, formatted more to look interesting than to read well. It’s all done with full-color printing, although there are only a few full-color items in it (a handful of Sunday pages; all of the photographs, even ones that were originally in color, are reproduced monochromatically). Instead, the color is applied to the text; one page might be in medium blue text on a light blue page, another is yellow text on a dark green page. All of it is in a sans-serif font, which makes for slightly harder reading, and printed on glossy paper, which can cause glare problems in some lighting. Looking at the page, one is not encouraged to read it.

There are a few odd editorial decisions along the way, like the decision to discuss Schulz’s near-fiancee Donna as the person “who inspired the ‘red-haired girl’ in the strip”, avoiding the appropriate inclusion of “little” in that term. There’s a section where author Beverly Gherman explains that “Many cartoonists penciled in their whole strips and then inked over the lines. Not Sparky. He drew the characters with a pen [...] because he liked shaping them with a pen line, not copying over pencil lines.” The next spread is actually a two-page photo of a pencil in Sparky’s hand, a hand that leans on a strip where two of the panels are yet uninked, pencil-drawn figures clearly visible, with unerased pencil lines clearly visible in the inked panels. (There’s also things for us nigglers to stare at, like the “image from the Christmas television special A Charlie Brown Christmas” which appears to be a very good recreation of a shot from the special, only the line weight appears too light and Charlie Brown’s hands are in a position which his hands are never quite in in that scene. Or the fact that the page with that image comes in the midst of the phrase “But Sparky Sparky had always said”, with one “Sparky” on the previous page and one on the following page.)

All in all, this is a slick product in many ways, but if I had to recommend a Schulz bio for the younger set, I’d probably still go with the out-of-print Young Adult volume Charles M. Schulz: Cartoonist and Creator of Peanuts before I’d go with this.

My Life with Charlie Brown is a collection of various prose essays that Schulz did for various publications, talking (generally) about Peanuts and his life as a cartoonist.

For those studying Schulz, this is an interesting work. You’re apt to have seen much of the material before; the biggest chunk of the material (about 1/3) is the text portions of Peanuts Jubilee, the 25th anniversary book from 2005. Other pieces we’ve seen excerpted from elsewhere, providing sideline commentary in books like You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown and Peanuts: A Golden Celebration. Still other pieces are unpublished, seen here for the first time. Sources include not just Peanuts books, but articles written for newspapers, magazines, and books, and one transcribed speech for the National Cartoonist Society, with items from the 1950s into the 1990s. One piece is officially written not by Schulz, but by Charlie Brown.

Schulz’s prose is clear, clean, and direct. His flow from topic to topic is, however, rather choppy. He speaks in short anecdotes, which actually makes it good for the sort of excerption that was done in some of the anniversary books, but can give the reader a bit of whiplash reading it. Often, they read more like a personal letter than something with a specific theme to cover.

There are lots of little treats to be found – Schulz denying his first wife was a “Lucy” (a key claim of Schulz and Peanuts), some comments on the creation of the Youth magazine cartoons that I wish I had when editing Schulz’s Youth, Schulz expressing his interest in Northern Exposure star Janine Turner, and so forth. On the other hand, since most of this material was created not as a single organized effort but for specific purposes, there is a lot you’d want to see Schulz write about that he didn’t, as well as some repetition beween articles.

The main organization of the book is solid; there’s a Schulz timeline in the front to give you context, then the essays are grouped as “My Life”, “My Profession”, and “My Art” – logical and useful groupings, and there’s an appendix for a couple of odd bits (a report Schulz wrote for a class on the novel; a poem he wrote for his wife). However, there are some sloppinesses – a didn’t’ here, an incorrect attribution there, calling Craftint Doubletone paper Crafting – and some bad choices. The source of each essay is named at the end of the essay, when knowing the source while reading the essay would actually help the reader understand the intended context – who was being written to and when (I found myself simply skipping to the end of each piece before I read it). There are occasional Peanuts strips inserted, and the pages they’re on include distracting thick black angles; it was a while before I realized that they were supposed to invoke the zig-zag on Charlie Brown’s shirt. There aren’t explanations for individual pieces, so that things that would be understood by Schulz’s intended audience can go by the reader. For example, in his address to the NCS, Schulz complained about people who were not members and who said that they weren’t “joiners”, it might help to know he was referring to comments by “Calvin & Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson; or the one place (I can’t quickly find to quote) where he talks about keeping his strip clean and not doing material about toilets and fire hydrants, which might not make sense unless you’d read “Mother Goose & Grimm” and seen how those items are used in that strip (Schulz certainly did not exile fire hydrants from his strip, he just didn’t use them in untoward ways.)

So is it an ideal version of what it is? I don’t think so – but it’s something that is good enough. I’m glad that I have it.