There is psychological economics concept called “loss aversion”, which relates (as I loosely understand it) to the idea that we feel certain sort of economic losses far more than we feel gains; that you will remember that time you filled up and a minute later saw a gas station that had gas 8 cents/gallon cheaper (i.e., you made a bad deal) far longer than you will remember buying gas and then a minute later seeing a place that charged 8 cents/gallon more (you got a bargain). And this goes to why some things from eBay haunt me so. There are some things that I’ve allowed myself to be outbid on, and they haunt. But then there’s… Fistaszki.

Fistaszki is the Polish title for Peanuts, and today, there are translations of The Complete Peanuts being released with that name on them. But that’s not what I’m speaking of. You know I love a great Peanuts book, but I have a similarly complete love for Peanuts books that are odd or wrong in some way, and one of the champions of that in my collection is this:

That, as I’ve discussed here years back (and as I document in my Museum of Odd Peanuts Books) is a Polish Peanuts book from when Poland was still under communism, when they wouldn’t have felt the need to follow US copyright laws, but by doing so they also would not have had access to the proper source material for reproduction, which is why the interior of the book looks like this:

That’s right, it’s all completely redrawn Schulz strips.

This volume I have, it’s the third volume in a three volume set. Now, if you have any sense of the collector instinct, you know that having only volume three just ain’t happening. Years ago, I found an auction which was exactly what I needed:

That’s right, volumes 1 and 2, being auctioned by someone from Poland. And I bid. And I won. The price wasn’t that high, but shipping, even the slow shipping, added a fair bit to it. But I paid, gladly. Look at them, even just the covers, they are awesome in their wrongness. Charlie Brown in his baseball outfit with a soccer ball. Tongue-out Snoopy on a book that says “Drugie” (yes, I’m sure it doesn’t mean “druggie”; forgive me my cheap laughs.)

And the books never arrived. Because of the international slow shipping, I expected them to take a long time, which meant that I couldn’t complain in time to get a refund per eBay policy… but that didn’t matter. A refund was not what I wanted.

But someday I’ll find them. I shall. And then this small ache that has haunted me for years (someone mentioned Polish Peanuts to me the other day, and it flared up again) will be gone.

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