I was having a tough day yesterday, a day of tough decisions and bad news. But in the middle of it, the postman brought an unexpected gift from someone I like, and it really picked up my day. It was a Japanese edition of the 1976 original Peanuts book “I Never Promised You an Apple Orchard”, a book that hasn’t been in print in quite a while. (The copyright page of the book has an odd bit of history, saying it was originally published in English by Ballantine Books in 1984… but then says that the first edition was Holt Rinehart Winston in 1976, so, ummmm, I guess their definition of “originally published” differs from mine.)

So I open it up looking forward to seeing the Japanese version of the book… but then:

There’s the book… completely in English!

But no, I don’t stop there. I keep on going through, and hit the end of the book in English, where I find:

And I think “Cool! the book is done with the English version, and now I’m going to flip it upside down, so it reads from right to left (Japanese style), and read the same book in Japanese.” But, well, it’s not quite that clever. Turns out the page with the cover is likely bound in upside-down accidentally (something it’s quite possible to do with a single bound-in sheet.) Because the book continues in its left-page-then-right-pagedness:

It’s a miniature reproduction of the images, with the English text accompanied by the Japanese translation. So finally the folks who don’t know English can read the book… or at least what they think is the book. I’m a little dubious that the translation could be both accurate and interesting. That’s not to say that the English version is uninteresting, just that, well…

Well, this is the collected writing of Snoopy, and one spread had him writing about Dorothy Fledermaus, and how her nickname was Dee Fiedermaus. Which is fine if you’re used to the name “Dorothy”, know that its nickname is “Dee”, and are familiar with Strauss’s German operetta, Die Fledermaus. This pun-laden book may be a bit more of a cultural stretch than a typical Peanuts volume.

It was a perfect gift… kindly intended, and fascinating in its own special way.

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