The fine folks at the currently closed Charles M. Schulz Museum have up a nice page with a few resources for those of you with kids – some at-home learning tools, a couple of activities. And in the midst of this they have Snoopy’s Daily Dozen, which was a collection of Peanuts characters showing you how to do a dozen different exercises. These are Schulz drawings (although the lettering is another matter), and they are interesting takes on the kids… because they’re having to do things that the characters were not designed to do. (They have knees!) This is interesting Peanuts stuff, and the original 1960s publication is not an easy one to find.

The downloadable version has a couple of interesting variations from the original (which was an odd format in itself; it was a chart that flipped up like a calendar, rather than something that opened sideways like a book. In fact, given the page count, I assume that Hallmark, who published this, used calendars as a template.) One is that they’ve recolored it. The original was produced with just two color printing, so every page was made up of black, red, and the white of the paper.

The downloadable version uses a full range of color.

The PDF has a seven page introductory Frieda-and-Snoopy strip that Schulz drew for the original chart, but which didn’t get used.

Which, by the way, shows how the Schulz Museum has continued to improve its collection. Back in 2007, I had some correspondence with the then-archivist for the museum; they were looking for information on this book (due to a request from another museum), and didn’t have a copy. Now, not only do they have a copy, they have pages of the original art, including not only the unused introductory strip, but also some exercises that were left out of the published version.

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