One thing about the switch from the previous blog-by-mail system to the current one is that if there were multiple blog posts in a day, the old system would send a single digest email while the new one will send an email for each post. Not wanting to flood people’s email boxes, I’m trying to limit myself to a post per day, so you’ll see more newslettery posts like this one.

• A major comics-oriented distributor declared bankruptcy this year. While that hit every publisher at some level (they owe me thousands of dollars I’ll likely never see), it really hit publishers that were using the distributor’s warehousing services. Folks involved in the bankruptcy are now claiming the right to sell off all of those stored books for their own benefit. This is worse that just having the millions in stock being destroyed; it means that these copies that publishers paid to have printed will be competing with their own copies on the market. Fantagraphics, publishers of the Complete Peanuts series, the Peanuts Every Sunday series, and many other Peanuts reprint books, is one of the publishers caught in this bind… so they are having a 30% off sale on books ordered through them through August 25, in order toi generate money to pay their lawyers. Here is where you’ll find all their Peanuts books.  They publish a rather broad array of comics material, there’s not a lot of things where I can say “if you like Peanuts, you’ll also like X”. (At the moment, I’m in the midst of reading and appreciating the literary graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters, but that’s about as not-Peanuts as you can get.)
• The folks behind the Unpacking Peanuts podcast had been saying that they were going to switch to a subscription model. The episode with me as guest was supposed to be the last one under normal free distribution (what, I’m not worth paying for!?!) However, they have changed their minds, and further episodes, working under the subtitle “Understanding Snoopy”, will continue to stream for free.
• I never did get around to doing a full post on Beaglefest. While I’ve already mentioned the Italian collections which I picked up at the gift shop, I made sure to check the room sales that people were having so that I might find something for the AAUGH Blog Reference Library that I might not have usually gotten. What I ended up with was two booklets of knitting patterns, seemingly from the early 1990s.
• I might as well say that except for a minor technical glitch, my presentation on the Charlie Brown’s Career Education Program filmstrips went well, even if I did have to carve it back a bit from its usual 45 minute running time. We did have time to show one full filmstrip with its original audio, and, once that set the tone, another full one with a voice cast pulled from the audience (as seen in Raymond Flournoy’s fine photo below.)  It seemed like the audience was enjoying it (if not, don’t tell me!) This was the third and possibly final time that I’ve given this presentation. (I’m open to doing it again, of course, but having hit the two major comics conventions that I usually attend and now a Peanuts-specific event, I’m not sure where else would want it.)
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