Charles Schulz was a stickler about language in his strip. You could see it in the way he included accurate shorthand or transcribed musical notes, the written language of music. He paid close attention to his punctuation. But all of that does not mean that he didn’t make mistakes. For example, here is a picture of the original art for a panel he drew for the Monday, August 15 1960 strip:

Did you catch that? If not, there’s no shame in it; it’s an error that has flitted past many eyes over the years. But take a look at that first line of text again. What’s that “or” doing there? Clearly, it doesn’t belong. Schulz was presumably so focused on the craft of lettering that he lost track of what he was writing, committing… well, I guess it’s not a typo, because it’s not typed. It’s a writo.

Schulz missed it, and apparently the folks at the syndicate did as well. The stats of that panel went out, and the error appeared in various newspapers.

But it didn’t appear in most newspapers, at least based on my sample of 16 or so papers that carried Peanuts at the time. It’s possible a lot of individual paper editors caught the mistake, but it seems more likely that the syndicate caught the error after the stats had shipped out and sent a note asking papers to correct it. It’s obvious that the syndicate did not correct it themselves, because there is clear variance in the correction. On some of them, the removal was smoothly done:

In some cases, they underdid their efforts, such as this paper where they were removing the top and bottom outlines of the strip anyway for space reasons, but left little bits of the offending letters:

In some cases they over-removed, like this case where they wiped out not only a chunk of the top margin line, but enough of the exclamation point in the second line to turn it into a colon:

Sometimes, they both over- and under-did it (and by the way, one of several papers that had headers saying the strip was by “Schultz”):

And then there’s this paper where they apparently both badly covered it up and put a dash over the whole thing:

But that’s what happened on the day of release. When it came to reprinting the strip for posterity, a better correction was made, as seen in this shot from Peanuts Parade #10: What Makes Musicians So Sarcastic?:

So everything is settled and satisfied, yes? Well, no. You see, at some point, the Peanuts folks made a big electronic database of the strips, creating source material that their licensees could access. And to create nice, sharp reproductions, they went back to the original stats where they could. Which means that if you go to the online Peanuts archive at gocomics.com, you’ll find this panel:

And checking out my hardcover edition of The Complete Peanuts volume 5: 1959-1960, I find this:

And if that’s as bad as it got, showing the imperfection of Peanuts in this permanent reference edition (and other modern books, such as The Big Book of Peanuts), it would’ve been a minor thing. But it almost got much worse.

In 2015, Fantagraphics solicited the paperback reprint of that Complete Peanuts volume, and as with all such solicitations from them, they included a tentative cover:

But face was saved. Someone pointed out the error while the cover was still being reworked (the paperback covers generally are changed somewhat before release), and this is what was released in 2016:

And that is today’s deep dive! (If you think I put too much effort into this, please realize that I compromised with myself and didn’t order a copy of the paperback Complete Peanuts just to check if they corrected the strip inside as well!)

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