Back to The Peanuts Collection
- By : Nat
- Category : Nat news, Upcoming releases
Strolling back through my upcoming book The Peanuts Collection, we’re up to, let’s see, page 26, which is a spread about Peanuts licensing. The decoration on this spread are largely of books – a Peanuts Datebook from 1962 (an early Determined Productions product), of the Woman’s Sports Foundation’s Cookbook (with Sparky’s recipe for Cold Cereal), of Snoopy’s Daily Dozen… even the interactive item is the cover of The Snoopy Doghouse Cookbook, which opens to reveal the recipe for “cookie bones”. And hey, there’s a Peanuts illustration that Schulz did for a physics textbook!
Turn the page, and we’re on to a spread about Pig-Pen, or “Pigpen”, or “Pig-Pen”, depending on which era of the strip you’re looking at. (And there’s a statue pictured which says “Pig Pen”, just to confuse things more.) A bit of editorial discussion went into this spread, because he’s one of the characters who looms larger in public memory than he ever did in the strip.
The next spread is on Peanuts in the classroom, discussing a number of ways which the strip and its characters were used in educational realms. Following that is a spread on how Peanuts is linked to music, from classical to jazz to rock. I got a couple nice quotes from John Burdett, drummer for The Royal Guardsmen, who recorded a number of Snoopy-related songs including “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”, which hit as high as #2 on the Billboard chart. Some nice illustrations of album covers, music-oriented strips…. and ooh, the cover of Toccata E… Fuga, one of my all-time favorite Peanuts book covers. (It’s an Italian book of nothing but Lucy-and-Schroeder-at-the-piano strips.)
We’re just past the halfway point in hte book. There is work to be done, so the next spread, with the tipped-in reproduction of a publication discussed recently on this blog, will have to wait until next time.
If you have a favorite bookstore and want to preorder, the ISBN is 978-0316086103 (US edition), 978-1741730685 (Australian edition), or 978-1-84773-827-1 (UK edition.) For those who like to order from your favorite online sites, here are the links:
