Linus in "Live and Learn" on a link

The latest addition to the AAUGH.com Reference Library is a book we already have a copy of… but in a format we don’t have a copy of. In fact, I’m not sure if we can actually call it a book. It’s a series of square pages with rounded corners, linked at the top by a keychain loop. This strip collection contains 8 strips, one panel per page side, and Live and Learn is one of several books that were released in this loop format.

Which leaves just one question: Why? What is the point of these odd little items? Are you expected to use them as awkwardly-large keychains? To dangle them from your belt loop so that people will have to get uncomfortably close to enjoy Schulz’s cartoon stylings? To hook several of them together to create a floppy chaotic objects? Was there some fad I’m forgetting from 40 years ago that made this appropriate? I mean, someone must’ve bought some. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be ones around for selling on eBay.

This is a mysterious world.

Classic finds
Charles M. Schulz: Pinko scum?

As with most of my history finds, I found the column when I was looking for something else, something only related because they both had the term “comic strip.” But there it was… George Boardman, PhD, was telling the world that there was a problem with socialist propaganda on America’s …

New releases
Peanuts Storybook Treasury

The Peanuts Storybook Treasury slams 18 of the Simon Spotlight storybooks from 2015 through 2021 into a single hardcover volume. In order to get them all into 304 pages, it cheats just a little bit, skipping over the covers and individual copyright pages, and occasionally combining what had been two …

Classic finds
A set completed and a mystery solved

Twenty years ago when I first published a collection of It’s Only a Game by Charles Schulz and Jim Sasseville, I proudly announced that it was the first reprint collection of the strip ever! But then I saw at auction a little pamphlet that looked like this: and I later found …