Two books joined the AAUGH.com Reference Library today, neither of them new volumes. One of them brought grins, one brought a loud meh.

Four years back I noted that there was a book out called Man’s Best Friend, documenting a gallery show by Kaws, an artist some of whose work consists of little more than reproducing someone else’s work with X’s for eyes. And as I found Kaws’s work unimpressive and some of the ethics questionable, I used the fact that it was price at $200 as an excuse to skip it, despite my completist collecting tendencies.

Well, since I had made that my reason, that reason was overcome when still-shrinkwrapped copies popped up for a mere $30. I somewhat reluctantly made the purchase. The hardcover is over 200 pages long, but there aren’t nearly that many pieces of art; items are photographed from varying angles, rooms are shown in full, and the titular piece, “Man’s Best Friend”, which is an array of fifty images of little pieces of drawings of Snoopy and Woodstock, is documented at one-piece-per page. It does fill out a book. But none of the pictures moved me, none impressed me; this could reasonably be described as a Peanuts book, but it’s nonetheless not for me.

But I also recently landed on a eBay listing for something I’d sought for a long while, and now $99 plus shipping later, it is mine. You longtime readers may remember me having a fascination with the Braille editions of the Happiness is a Warm Puppy-type books were created in the 1960s for use in libraries for the blind. (I’ve even dragged one along to some of my personal appearances, so that people could experience them.) Only a few hundreds of each volume were made, and they were not intended for general circulation, not for sale to the general public… yet somehow I had managed to land copies of four of the six volumes that I know to exist, even got doubles of one. Sure, the books were generally beat up, frequently missing pages, but the pages they have, wow! If you know the Happiness is a Warm Puppy books, you know that they have pages of simple text facing pages of Peanuts images, and these Braille editions added a braille page of text facing the printed page of text, and a raised version of the image facing the image. Raised Peanuts images for the blind, a great thing.

Well, you won’t be surprised that the book I landed was one of the two I didn’t already have, specifically Suppertime (I’m still without a copy of Christmas is Together-Time.) And the book is in very good condition… sure, the years have been hard on its now-brittle comb binding and a couple of the curved times have broken off, but almost all of the pages appear to all still be there, all still be in order.

The good condition is actually a mixed bag to me. As a collector, yay! But this book should’ve had more of a life. It’s over half a century old, and it should’ve had many hands running over its images, opening and closing it, and just wearing it out.

Suppertime is not the absolute best book to do this with if what you really want is cool raised images. That’s because, unlike prior books in this series, the art for Suppertime was culled from the strip, rather than being original Schulz pieces designed to take advantage of the larger-than-a-comics-panel space.

Anyway. this book is making me happy. Heck, the mere fact that these books exist, that Snoopy was brought to the blind, makes me happy!

If you’d like to know more about how the Braille books were made, I interviewed one of the people involved in the project a few years ago.

Share the news!