*A THANKSGIVING FOR THE BOOKS
*FREE ONLINE SCHULZ DOCUMENTARY
*IS IT 2003 ALREADY?
*ANOTHER SCHULZ BIO FOR KIDS
*WHERE ARE THE FEBRUARY BOOKS?
*ODD PEANUTS BOOKS: CONVERSATION SCHOOLS
*INTERESTING FIND: GOOD MAN SOUVENIR BOOK
*NAT’S BOOK
*RECENT QUESTIONS
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A THANKSGIVING FOR THE BOOKS
The classic animated special A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING has been added to the list of specials being turned into kids books. Expect this book to come out in October. It’s not available for preorder yet.
Meanwhile, it looks like there will be an upscale edition of the A Charlie Brown Christmas adaptation, with retouched art. (Paige has gotten better at these adaptations as the series continues, and she wants this to look as good as it can.)
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FREE ONLINE SCHULZ DOCUMENTARY
The latest addition to the AAUGH.com guide is pretty neat — I’m hooking you up with an online video documentary about Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz! This documentary from the Roland Collection Of Films & Videos On Art is about a decade old, and runs close to half an hour in length.
Who says I don’t take care of my readers? http://AAUGH.com/guide/document.htm
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IS IT 2003 ALREADY?
I don’t have a 2002 calendar yet, but there’s a couple of 2003 Peanuts calendars already available for preorder for July shipping! There’s a mini-calendar: http://AAUGH.com/go.htm?0740724770 And then there’s the page-a-day calendar: http://AAUGH.com/go.htm?0740724010
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ANOTHER SCHULZ BIO FOR KIDS
Charles Schulz has been a popular topic for biographies aimed at school libraries recently. Now I get news of one more. A book entitled CHARLES SCHULZ is coming from Mitchell Lane Publishing in May. The author is Jim Whiting…
but *not* the same Jim Whiting who is president of the Southern California Cartoonists Society. The name is a coincidence.
This book is not yet available for preorder.
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WHERE ARE THE FEBRUARY BOOKS?
In February, Andrews McMeel was supposed to release a couple little miniature pocket-sized Peanuts books, MY SWEET BABBOO and OH FRIEND OF FRIENDS. Well, February has come and gone, and these books went from "coming soon" to "no longer available" without ever actually shipping!
What happened? I don’t know. I’m trying to find out if they were cancelled, or if they were published in some form that limits their distribution (such as only being available to retailers in large lots of books), or if they’re just delayed.
If you ordered several books including these, you may want to cancel your order for them so that the books you ordered will ship.
But if anyone sees these on the racks somewhere, let me know!
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ODD PEANUTS BOOKS: CONVERSATION SCHOOLS
The newest additions to the AAUGH.com reference library are SNOOPY’S ENGLISH CONVERSATION SCHOOL and LUCY’S ENGLISH CONVERSATION SCHOOL. These are books for Japanese readers who want to learn to practical English by reading Peanuts. Published by Tsuru in the early 1970s, these books contain strips printed in English, with translation beside them, and then a discussion of the phrases used in the strip and similar English usages. Most of the text is in black, but the strip and some decorative page elements are in another color.
Frankly, I think this is a great way to learn practical English, but I can’t help but to think of students in Tokyo puntuating all their conversations with "Good grief!" and "AAUGH!" And, as I’ve often found to be true of English phrasebooks and the like, sometimes the English is wrong. "Would you like to have a coffee?" "I’m dating her with no thought of marring her." "The sea works high." "When it is night with you, it is day with us."
My favorite part of either of these two books is toward the back of the Snoopy volume: Snoopy’s English-Sound Dictionary. This section reprints a lot of individual panels featuring sound effects and onamotapoeia. So if you want to know how to translate (or at least transliterate) EEK!, AAUGH! WOOP!, OOF! CLICK, SNAP, TEAR, or DLUM TDLUM TLUM into Japanese, this is what you need. It even has a page just on the sounds of laughter.
There appear to be 4 books in the series. The titles are in English on the cover, but the list of titles in the back is in Japanese, so I don’t know what the other two titles are (not being able to read Japanese.)
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INTERESTING FIND: GOOD MAN SOUVENIR BOOK
Another recent addition to the AAUGH.com reference library is a copy of the souvenir book for YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN. This 11" by 8.5" 20 page booklet with a cardboard cover consists primarily of lines of dialog and lyrics, with Schulz illustrations on each page (apparently recycled strip art.) There are also pictures of not only the original New York cast, but also the original casts of Boston, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oslo! An article on how the play came about is written by "John Gordon", the pseudonym credited for the show’s libretto (the non-singing portions of the play.) "Gordon" is really just a collection of the various folks who were involved in the play as it evolved. (Apparently, the show launched without a written script; scenes had evolved around the songs, and it wasn’t until the play had been running for a while that someone bothered to make a written record of all the dialog they had come up with!)
This booklet appears to be from 1966 or ’67, and was likely sold at venues where the play was being performed. It was published by The Peanuts Company, of course!
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NAT’S BOOK
I promised to let everyone know when PANEL ONE: COMIC BOOK SCRIPTS BY TOP WRITERS was coming out. Well, it hits better U.S. comic book shops this Wednesday, and we’ll be offering it through AAUGH.com later this month. This is a collection of comic book scripts by various writers, and it should be of interest to would-be comics creators. I’m editor and publisher of this book. The authors include myself, Neil Gaiman (best-selling author of American Gods and Sandman), Kurt Busiek, Dwayne McDuffie, Trina Robbins, Greg Rucka, Jeff "Bone" Smith, Kevin "Chasing Amy" Smith (a Jay & Silent Bob story!) and Marv Wolfman. For more info, see http://www.aboutcomics.com I’ll let you know when it’s available for online ordering.
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RECENT QUESTIONS
Not long ago, someone asked me whether PEANUTS, the first book in the Holt reprint series, ever appeared with the white cover design that Holt was issuing books in during the early 1970s. That was an easy one for me to answer; I happen to have a copy of the 32nd printing of that book, issued in November of 1972. It does indeed have a white border design around a full-color image rather than the two-color cover design of earlier printings. Today, however, I got an inquiry from another source, someone who owns what appears to be one of the production mock-ups made when preparing the 32nd printing. What is interesting is that his mock-up is made from a copy of the previous printing, which has the old cover design. This means the 32nd printing was the first one to bear the new cover design. Since Holt stopped issuing the full books in 1975 when they switched to the Peanuts Parade reprint format, and since it was 4 years between the 31st printing (November 1968) and the 32nd (November 1972) it is quite possible that this is also the last printing of the book, and thus the only one with the white cover design (and the only one to have an ISBN number.) Does anyone out there have a copy of any printing after the thirty-second? If so, let me know!
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Well, that’s all the news and bits o’ trivia for today. I hope you found something worth reading in this issue; it started out to be a short one and ended up being a long one. When I think I have enough stuff again, you’ll get another issue!
In the meantime: remember to keep me up-to-date with your changing email addresses! I just lost a cadre of subscribers who never update their addresses when @Home went under. Now that various AT&T Broadband subscribers have to change their addresses as well, I’m afraid I’ll lose a few more.
