It’s been a few months since I finished my work on the writing and editing of The Peanuts Collection, and it’s still a few months before its in stores… but in the big leagues, they print the books months before they hit the stores. So I’m sitting here with my author copies (including ones bearing the imprint of the US publisher Little Brown, the UK publisher New Holland, and the Australian publisher Cameron House. Really, they’re all the exact same book except for the publisher logo, price, UPC, and copyright page… but you know me, I’d be glad to have these variations even if I weren’t the author!)

I’ve written a couple dozen books, but this is the first hardcover edition I’ve had… and what a production. It’s not only hardcover – it’s slip-cased! That’s nice on a couple levels. One is that it makes the whole thing feel fancy, but also it means that all the items that are there to convince you to buy the book (the announcement “includes framable prints”, the description of the book,the UPC,  and so forth, are on the slipcase, so the book itself has a cover that’s all a mosaic of Peanuts/Schulz images.

Start flipping through, get past the Table of Contents, and you land on a foreword by Schulz’s daughter, Amy Schulz Johnson, talking about her dad. Then you get a note from the author (that bum!), and then finally you get to the heart of the book. It’s all organized by two-page spreads. The first spread is a bio of Schulz himself – there’s probably not a lot in the text here that will surprise AAUGH Blog readers, but we’ve got some interesting illustrations, including a 1957 letter from Sparky to his syndicate, encouraging them to change the title of his already-popular strip.

The next spread talks about Peanuts on its home ground, the comic strip. Yes, there’s some nice images here, including reproduction of some “Li’l Folk” art you may not have seen before. But it’s on the right-hand page of this spread that you’ll find the first example of what makes this not just an ordinary book, but rather what the marketing people are calling an “interactive” book. Sticking out of a clear pocket is a little brochure marked as The Peanuts Album. This is a reproduction of a giveaway that was offered by some newspapers in the early 1950s, introducing the Peanuts characters, as well as offering up a then-current photograph of the Schulz family. It’s not an item I’d ever seen before starting work on this book, and now I’m glad I have this.

I’m going to stop here on the journey through the book for now. Let me quickly note a few things, though. First off, even though my name is on the cover, I can’t take all the credit for what’s in this book. Really, I was mainly responsible for the words (and even then, there was a lot of feedback and input from a range of folks). There were some editorial folks putting in a lot of effort finding interesting images and objects; I put in my suggestions, naturally, and even provided access to some of my collection, but they found a lot of good stuff that I would’ve missed.

Secondly, I want to reassure all the collectors out there that the reproduction items in here are just that, reproductions, and they’re marked as such. Each has the small word “reproduction” on them, and some are a different size or length than the original item – these reproductions will be identifiable, should anyone try to pass them off as the original items.

Anyway, this book is available for preorder, either by talking to your local shop or by ordering from one of your favorite online sites:

• Amazon
• Indybound
• Borders
• B&N

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