* COMPLETE PEANUTS AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
* AAUGH.COM INTERVIEWS A PEANUTS BOOK EDITOR
* NUMBERS CONFUSE ME
* THESE JAPANESE BOOKS REALLY COOK
COMPLETE PEANUTS AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER
You can now preorder The Complete Peanuts Volume 1, which reprints
all of the newspaper strips from 1950, 1951, and 1952. Just go to
http://AAUGH.com/to.htm?156097589X
But just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should
do it. If you order it now, you’ll pay the full cover price of
$28.95. While the book is worth that, you can do better. I can’t say
for sure when, but sometime in the six months before the book comes
out, we’ll be able to offer you a better deal.
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AAUGH.COM INTERVIEWS A PEANUTS BOOK EDITOR
I’ll admit it, I always like getting those little notes from people
who just discovered AAUGH.com and like it. But it was a special
thrill when the note came from Wallace Exman, who edited Peanuts
books at both World (the original publisher of books adapting the
animated specials) and Holt Rinehart and Winston (publisher of strip
collections, original books, and books adaptating the animated
movies.) Seeing my chance, I pounced and got a short Peanuts book
nerd interview with him. You can read it at
http://AAUGH.com/guide/exman.shtml
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NUMBERS CONFUSE ME
I had known for a while that Budget Books in Australia
published their own editions of at least some of Ravette
Books’s numbered Snoopy Stars series.
However, it wasn’t until I received one of these books
that I discovered that, while they issued the same
books, they numbered them differently. Snoopy Stars As
Man’s Best Friend, number 6 in the Ravette series,
is #4 in the Budget Books series. To make matters worse,
in the back of the Budget Books edition is a numbered
list of the 5 books in their Snoopy Stars series, but
the numbers on the list aren’t the numbers on the book
(…Man’s Best Friend is #1 on the list.)
All this complication in addition to the fact that
Ravette published revised editions in this series
without marking them as such, that more recently
they’ve reissued the same books under different
titles and collected them into compilations under
yet further title…. suddenly, I’m reminded of just
why I thought the world needed a website to sort this
all out.
If any of you have any of the Budget Books editions
of the Snoopy Stars books, I’d be interested in knowing:
1) Which title it is
2) What number it is (the number is in a star on the spine)
3) Whether the pages are numbered
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THESE JAPANESE BOOKS REALLY COOK
Mr. Deliveryman left me a package today. Or maybe it was Ms.
Deliveryman, the box was just left on the stoop. It was a shipment
from Japan of 6 Peanuts books I’d ordered. Thing is, I didn’t know
what they were when I ordered them, all I had to go off of was the
title and the cover picture.
Turns out, half of them are cookbooks, with full-color photos of
the food mixed with Peanuts pictures and strips.
While all three have English-language titles as their primary
titles, SITTING TOGETHER EATING TOGETHER is the only one of the
three with the recipes in English. This one is broken up into
12 chapters, one for each month, So January’s chapter is NEW
YEAR’S PARTY, with appropriate food for that holiday. April
is A WONDERFUL LUNCH BOX, with foods you could take to school,
such as Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwiches or Baby Quiche. May
is BOYS BE AMBITIOUS!, while August is ENJOY!? SUMMER CAMP.
SNOOPY CASUAL RESTAURANT covers soups, sandwiches, pastas,
pizzas, and snacks. For emulating a casual restaurant, the
food is presented in a very pretty manner. In fact, making
the food photogenic sometimes trumps making the food
practical; for example, you really shouldn’t put ketchup on
the outside of your hotdog bun.
But the book that really inspired this purchase was SNOOPY
AMERICAN SWEETS; I was intrigued by the cover with photos of
donuts surrounding Snoopy. As a recipe book, they’re using
questionable definitions of both “American” and “sweets”.
There are odd-looking deserts here that I don’t recognize,
and much of the book focuses on pancakes and waffles.
I also got two volumes of PEANUTS KEY WORDS, which appears
to be an educational series. Each two-page spread in these
small hardcover books has a strip on one side (English
subtitled in Japanese), and an English word relevant to the
strip on the other side with an essay in Japanese. Whether
the essay is defining the word or just musing on the topic,
I cannot tell.
Finally, there’s issue 9 of SNOOPY MAGAZINE. This is a
reasonably thick magazine not because of its page count –
it’s a mere 66 pages – but because many of the pages are
stiff cardboard. These are colorful story pages for the
young set, and lucky for the American reader, they’re
arranged left-to-right with English text in addition to
the Japanese. The pages are die cut, making for half-pages,
pages shaped like Snoopy, pages were you can see through to
the next page. There are even pages with little flaps you
open to reveal hidden things. Plus there’s a sheet of
stickers, including the only sticker I’ve seen of Molly
Volley. And there are a couple of cardboard items that you
can punch out and put together. Then there are photo-filled
articles about the Peanuts portions of Universal Studios
Japan, the Schulz Museum, on new Peanuts products, and one
that looks to be about the history of Snoopy dolls. These
are all in Japanese (which is on the extremely long list
of languages I do not read.) Even the ads are for Peanuts
products, including a cell phone with Peanuts displays and
puzzles on its full-color screens.
This all ran about 10,000 yen, including shipping to the
United States. That’s about ninety bucks. If anyone’s
interested, I’ll post information about ordering Japanese
books next issue — so let me know if you’re interested.
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I hope that fills your needs for Peantus book information until,
well, whenever I have enough news for another newsletter. Keep
those questions and requests coming.
And hey, if any of you are heading to super*MARKET, the
independent comics convention at UCLA November 8th and 9th, be
sure to stop by the About Comics table and say “Hi!”
–Nat, proprietor
http://AAUGH.com
nat@AAUGH.com
