An appropriately awkward Valentine
The latest in Fantagraphics’s series of square seasonal giftbooks is A Valentine for Charlie Brown. And it’s good at what it is, but may not be good for what you’d want it for. It’s good because it’s a collection of Valentine’s Day-themed Peanuts strips, broken up into three sections: one about …
What happens when fun is illegal
Back in 1975, the Department of Commerce put out a booklet called The American Economic System… and Your Part In It. It used a number of Peanuts illustrations along with its text to help explain the economy. Now, materials produced by employees of the US government as part of their work are …
The bookshelves get a little heavier
Three more items were added to the AAUGH.com Reference Library today, none of them at all large, but still, the bookshelves are filled and droopy. The more important one to me is one I’ve been seeking for years. It’s Your Town, Charlie Brown is an auction catalog/souvenir book for the statues …
a Schulz variant some got by Providence
If you’re a Schulz book collector who likes to get not only all the books, but every possible variant (not a path I recommend; that way lies madness!), you might want to get in touch with bridge-playing pals from the Northeast. Yesterday was the last day of the 2014 Fall …
Far better than those cuddleproofed Snoopys
I like to believe I’m great at catching Peanuts-related books that go through normal book distribution channels, and pretty good at spotting ones that go outside of those channels… but sometimes, one eludes me. That’s the case with the book Best Friends. No, no, not the book Best Friends that came bundled …
it’s Your Year, Charlie Brown!
As I’ve discussed before, it’s tough to make a good Peanuts prose book, because the humor of the strip is so grounded in the visuals and the rhythm they create. And the humor is so internal. Well, I’ve found a book that does the best job yet of making it …
the cookie cutters came
The repeatedly-delayed Peanuts Christmas Cookie Set finally exists. It features three cookie cutters: a very-Peanutsy Snoopy head one, an acceptably in the range christmas tree, and, well, a mitten. Accompanying them is a 48 page paperback cookbook of cookie recipes bearing names like “Woodstock’s Gingerbread Cookie Heroes”, “Spike’s Biscochitos Cut-Out Cookies”, …
Little Stories, Simple Truths
Newly available at your local Hallmark store… well, at least, at the second-most-local Hallmark store around here… is Little Stories, Simple Truths: The Joy of a Peanuts Christmas. This is a collection of Christmas-themed Peanuts dailies, with one-page essays by Molly Wigand introdcing each of five sections. The essays don’t …
Solving the Charlie Brown Christmas puzzle
So you were wondering how long we would have to go without a fresh book format adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas? Well, you can return to spending the time you had focused on that question to instead doing your job or taking care of your family, because the answer is …
Two decades worth of good Peanuts news
Last year, I found The Big Book of Peanuts Comics, a single volume which collected all of the Peanuts daily strips (i.e., no Sundays) from the 1970s, for sale for about $20 at Costco. A number of you wanted to lay your hands on a copy, but the only place I …