The Czechs came in the mail (yes, yes, every joke about Czech is how it sounds like “check”. The world is that simple.)

Classic finds

The books I ordered from the Czech Republic arrived yesterday. They took two months to get here, but that’s fine – shipping that isn’t slow isn’t cheap. These books are 2007-2008 translations of Love is Walking Hand in Hand. Happiness is a Warm Puppy, and Educating Peanuts. If you don’t recall that last title, don’t be surprised; it was a British book which took comments about school from the strip, making an image-and-a-line book similar to the other two books shown. The book does included the note that “in some cases, the captions have been paraphrased from the original wording,” which I find humorous, as I’m pretty sure that in no cases was the original wording in Czech.

One thing that will irritate me about these books is that, while the standard in most places is for the text on a book’s spine to be read from top to bottom, for Czech it is common for the text to start at the bottom and go up. So now every time I see these on my shelves, my brain will spend a second telling me “those books are upside-down!”

If you need some Czech in your collection, this is where I ordered them from.

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 …