Double-header
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
I had been lacking books from the Snoopy Museum in Tokyo, so when I saw one one for sale on eBay, I chunked up some money and ordered it. It was a bit more than I like to spend on one book… which is why I was so happy when it turned out to be two! It isn’t a boxed set per se, because what they were in was open at both ends. It was, I suppose, a tubed set.
Inside was the book that I thought I was getting, a paperback which the listing said was an exhibition book, but seems to be just a straightforward strip collection, The Best of Peanuts. All the strips are printed in black and… well, not white, they use color-tinted paper, and the text is all in Japanese (in contrast to many Japanese strip collections, where they either leave the English text in the strip with the Japanese on the outside of the strip, or have Japanese dialogue with the English source typeset outside the panel.) There are one to four dailies or one Sunday on each page, all presented in the original publication order. It leans toward later strips; the first half fo the Peanuts run takes up less than a third of the book.
The other book is a hardcover that apparently is the exhibit book for the traveling exhibit The Best of Peanuts, and it’s in full color, with lots of pictures of the original art. The only outside-the-strip substantial English text is the introduction by cartoonist Lex Fajardo, who works at the Schulz studio. This exhibit ran in a couple locations from 2016 to 2019. There are pictures of a number of Peanuts toys and other licensed items, and there’s some photos of books… and it his me because one of those books is Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking, the collection and reformatting of Peanuts stories that ran in women’s magazines in the 1960s… a project I conceived of and compiled. It just seems weird to have something of my work on display at a museum, even though it is of course not on display because of me in any way. Still, this tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me that I have had impact on the world.
There are more of these sets available on eBay, including some that are cheaper than what I paid (yes, once I stumbled across one, I forgot to search for other examples. Let that be a lesson to you all!) But I also see that this is book 6 from the museum, so, >sigh<, I still have more spending to do.
