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Unquote alone

The warning signs about the new book Rediscovering the True Meaning of Christmas with A Charlie Brown Christmas”: Celebrating Christmas with a Charlie Brown Touch starts with the title, and its curious use of a single double-quotation mark. That’s part of the name every time it’s listed, whether on the …

Upcoming releases

His bark is worse than his bite

This year’s new Hallmark book for the upcoming Great Pumpkin holiday is Beware the Vampire Beagle! Like other recent such books, it has a single pop-up image in the back. I’ve not yet gotten one, but given that it’s got Rich LaPierre art, it’ll at least look good.

New releases

The line stays drawn

There is much to be said for the modern self-publishing apparatus, but it also makes it mighty easy to offer materials of dubious value. As such, I’ve decided that even in my completism, I needn’t purchase absolutely every Peanuts-related book that someone drops on the public via use of self-publishing …

Classic finds

A set completed and a mystery solved

Twenty years ago when I first published a collection of It’s Only a Game by Charles Schulz and Jim Sasseville, I proudly announced that it was the first reprint collection of the strip ever! But then I saw at auction a little pamphlet that looked like this: and I later found …

Classic finds

The Last Bookstore

L.A.’s famous The Last Bookstore is quite a place not only to find books, but to cave in to whimsy, as its decor (particularly in the upstairs section) might find you walking through a tunnel of books, or you might happen to be there when one of the shelves suddenly …

General

The real Linus’s real cartooning

Like many Peanuts fans, I knew that the character of Linus was named after Linus Maurer, who worked at Art Instruction alongside Schulz. Like seemingly fewer fans, I knew that Maurer himself had been a syndicated cartoonist… but for some reason I never saw any of his strip before today. …

Upcoming releases

I really hope they keep this title

Coming in May of next year, as the 18th entry in the series of full color Peanuts strip reprints is…. Snoopy Summer 2025 Kids Collection . Finally, they’ve found a title that has not already been used before! Presumably, that is just a holder title until they fall back on …

Nat news

Happiness is a foreign book

Happiness is finding that a book you wrote has been translated into another language. Sadness is finding that Amazon lists you as “unknown author”.  

New releases

Three fantastic stories… out of a couple dozen?!?

With Costco getting out of the book business, I thought we might have seen the end of Costco-exclusive Peanuts books already, but such appears not to be the case. Today I happened upon The Peanuts Gang’s Grand Adventures, a hardcover which combines Snoopy Soars to Space, Adventures with Linus and Friends!, and …

Comic-Con

Charles Manga Schulz comes to Comic-Con

It’s less than two weeks to the start of the San Diego Comic-Con (and months too late to get tickets to it, if that’s what you were hoping.) There will be be an official Peanuts booth there, as usual. In addition to their usual line-up of special items made just …