We just finished one year, and already there’s another one!

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Welcome to 2023, AAUGH Blog readers! I hope that everyone has been having fantastic holidays. Here, we had two new pieces of Peanuts statuary enter the house during the holidays. One of them, a gift from Dr. Mrs. The AAUGH Blogger, was a Japanese piece that I had praised in this blog without obtaining… but now the Peanuts BOOK statue is mine! ’tis a wee thing; for this photo, I’ve posed it with some of the smallest books from the AAUGH.com Reference Library (a set which was available with and without strings so that you could hang them as ornaments), and they dwarf it. But it’s a lovely piece!

The word "book" spelled out in a statue - the b and k look like books cut into the shape of the letters, the first o is Charlie Brown and Snoopy in a comfy chair, CB reading a book, and the second O is a pile of books with Woodstock buried under the top volume.

That one, which I constructed myself (the Charlie Brown and Snoopy come as separate pieces) will be part of my collection forever. The other one, constructed by the rest of my family, is made of gingerbread and candy, and would not survive the years well… even if we didn’t decide one night to tear it down for snacks, which we almost certainly will do.I

A gingerbread house decoared with Peanuts character heads and candies. The box the kit came in is in the background.I can’t say that 2023 looks like a particularly exciting year for Peanuts books, at least in terms of what has been announced so far. The Peanuts Every Sunday series is complete. The books that people keep asking me if they will exist — a fifth and final volume of The Big Book of Peanuts or a second volume of The Peanuts Dell Archive — seem unlikely to appear. There are only about a half dozen official licensed Peanuts books on the public schedule for 2023. We will have some new comic book format stories sandwiched in with reprints in the new “graphic novel” series, and there is that comic-strip-format Schulz biography on the way, but if there’s anything else that could be considered major, it’s not been announced yet.

But then, there are always surprises. The announced books reach only into summer. I know that there are other things being considered (mostly things I don’t know anything about), but I’m not sure which will happen this year, and which won’t happen at all. And hey, surprises are good!

But if they keep putting out the books, I’ll keep blogging them! So you’ll continue to see me in ’23. Peace to all out there.

Row of Peanuts christmas cards
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