a Peanuts book score
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds, Reviews
Let me tell you that one of the tough things about having collected Peanuts books for a long time and having done so successfully is that it gets harder to find anything I don’t already have. Sure, if I wasn’t a cheapskate, I could be ordering all sorts of books I can’t read from overseas, and occasionally I will get a few, but I can sometimes go a month or more without adding anything new old books (as opposed to just-issued books) to the AAUGH.com Reference Library.
Well, today I was at the library – not the AAUGH.com one, the regular one – and stopped next door at the Friends Of The Library used book store, looking for some (non-Peanuts) books for some publishing projects. And as long as I was there, I’d check the humor rack – it’s rare that I’ll find anything for my collection in a used bookstore any more, but it’s always fun checking.
Except I made a wrong turn. Instead of going into the humor aisle, I hit the aisle before that – the foreign language aisle. And there, sitting dead center in full bright colors, was Enciclopedia de Carlitos. The Spanish language translation of the Charlie Brown ‘Cyclopedia set. All 15 volumes.
Did I snatch them up? Of course!
Now, these 2003 books are translations of the English version from the 1990s, which were updates of the English versions of the 1980, which were a reworking of the material from the Charlie Brown’s Super Book of Questions and Answers series from the 1970s.
There have been two noticable changes done to this numbered set of books. One is small; the book that was volume 15 of the original set (“Planes and Things That Fly”) has become volume 11 (“Aviones y Demás Cosas Que Vuelan”). So what happened to volume 11 of the original? Ah, that’s the big change. If you believe the indicia page, “Holidays Around the World”:
has been translated as:
“La Magia de México” – The magic of Mexico! It covers the history, culture, and geography of our neighbor to the south (unless your one of our British readers, in which case it’s your distant neighbor to the west southwest.)
(To be fully precise, the indicia page says that it’s a translation of “Charlie Brown’s Cyclopedia Volumen 15, Holidays Around the World”, so it’s wrong on one count of spelling, on one number, and on the very basic fact!)
For those interested in this set, there are people selling used books through Amazon for as low as 99 cents (plus shipping), but it looks like just the first couple volumes. That suggests that these were sold in much the same way as the US editions, sold volume by volume over consecutive weeks in supermarkets, with the first ones at discounted prices to get you hooked, and thus the easiest ones to find used. If so, this would mean that this 15th and final volume will be particularly hard to find… although at the moment, Bookfinder finds a retailer selling that book for what I paid for the entire set, once you factor in shipping. (It also has one retailer selling volume 14 for over $100 including shipping… and listing the author as “Joe Cool”!) So yes, I count this as a good score all around.
