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.

I got good reaction to my post on the traced Peanuts books from Poland, so I’ve done a bit more research. It looks like the three volumes of this set (that’s all there were, three) were the first Peanuts books ever in Poland… and the last for a couple of decades. There was not another Peanuts book there until 2007, well after the end of Communism there. They’ve now got a few books in print, including the start of The Complete Peanuts.

I also want to make it clear that while some of the tracing is awkward, some of it isn’t too bad. It’s clear that there was well-intended effort put into the work, as when handling the opening panel from this 1975 Sunday strip:

It would’ve been easy to simply skip that panel, but instead, the adapters put the time in:

It ain’t Schulz, but it works for what it is. In general, I’m happy with the lettering on this odd item, preferring it to many modern translations which use computer fonts for all the lettering, deadening the liveliness of what was originally achieved. Particularly with the existence of a Schulz handwriting font, it’s very tempting for a publisher to use that for dialogue, but even that font creates a very mechanical feeling, losing much of the subtlety that is possible with hand-lettering. (I’ll admit to using a Schulz handwriting font for the collection Schulz’s Youth, but in that case I wasn’t dealing with material that was originally hand-lettered; the font added a bit of life in contrast to the standard typesetting fonts that the work had originally been laden with, I felt.)

Sadly, computer lettering has taken over the comic book field; there is much to be said for its convenience, but it never achieves the greatness of the best hand lettering.

Know what can make me happy on a tough day? Getting a Peanuts book in the mail.

Know what can make me very happy? Getting a Peanuts book published in a country not already reflected in my collection.

Know what can make do a little dance? Getting a Peanuts book in a language not already reflected in my collection.

Know what can make me ecstatic on a tough day? Getting a book from a country and in a language not already reflected in my collection, and finding it’s wonderfully weird.

Fistaszki: Trzecie Spotkanie is a Peanuts book published in Warsaw, Poland in 1984. For those of you who don’t have all your dates memorized – yes, Poland was still under Communist rule in the time (no, it was not part of the USSR, but it was generally allied with them.) And while the Communist bloc countries may be known for many things, respect for copyright and big budgets aren’t among them. I can’t say with absolute certainty that this is not a licensed item – there is a 1975 copyright notice for United Feature Syndicate at the end of the book – but this doesn’t look like something that would’ve passed approval. You see, this is a strip collection… and the strips are all traced.

Not a lick of pure Schulz to be found here. The quality of tracing varies, but the cover is particular hideous.

This particular 48 page saddle-stitched (i.e., stapled) black-and-white book with a color cover is the third in a series (online translators tell me “trzecie spotkanie” means “third meeting”), and the page numbering starts where the previous one left off – the pages are numbered 97-144. The strips are numbered 26-41, and there are a number of added illustrations framing the strips, on title pages, and so forth.

In the original version the soccer ball is... a golf green!

On one hand, it’s sad to see that people got redrawn Peanuts, because it was cheaper to produce. On the other hand, it says something that they were willing to do what it took to get some form of Peanuts to the people, as watered down as it may have been. Certainly, this is not a sort of book that I would encourage anyone to produce, but it’s a cool artifact to have…. and it’s the sort of thing we’re not likely to see again; even if there was a place where it was financially worthwhile to produce black market Peanuts books, it would be far easier to scoop some digital source material from somewhere than to trace the whole thing. To someone who knows what Peanuts is, this is like buying a bootleg DVD of Avatar and discovering that, rather than someone holding a video cam up to the movie screen, it’s whole film reenacted from memory by a group of high school sophomores.

I’m in love with this cheaply printed pile of tracings that I can’t read.