The man who pitted Snoopy against the Red Baron

Coming in March is Phil Gernhard, Record Man, a biography written by Bill DeYoung.  Gernhard, a record producer who (according to the promo blurb) had a life filled with addictions, wives, and demons that ended in suicide in 2008, has a very specific place in Peanuts history: he’s the guy who took the song that Dick Holler had written about the Red Baron and decided to add Snoopy to it, taking advantage of the popular ongoing gags in Peanuts about the beagle dogfighting the baron. The result was, of course, both a huge 1966 hit for the band the Royal Guardsmen and a legal mess, as Gernhard hadn’t actually bothered to get permission to use the Snoopy character. This wasn’t the only hit in Gernhard’s career, and the book certainly isn’t going to be about just that, but if you want it, there you go!

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book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas
A portrait of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Also, a landscape.

Looks like we’ll be getting a couple more editions of book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas this year. One is a board book version of the 2015 Tina Gallo and Scott Jeralds adaptation that’s already been reworked before, and the other… is also a board book version of that …

Upcoming releases
The one and only 75th anniversary book

Past Peanuts anniversaries have sometimes had several books waving the sign that this is an anniversary book, but this year, at least one book is proclaiming that it is the one and only Peanuts 75th Anniversary book. The Essential Peanuts: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time will be a slipcased …

Upcoming releases
Every Sunday comes around again

Shipping this September (or so they say) is the first volume of the paperback rerelease of Peanuts Every Sunday, the series which reprints the Sunday strips for the entire run of the strip, in color. The solicitation doesn’t appear to have the dimensions on it, so I don’t know if …