Sources are reporting that KKR is buying Simon and Schuster, probably currently the biggest publisher of Peanuts thanks to their Little Simon-published storybooks, from the current owner, Paramount. Sometimes, when one company buys another, it makes no real difference, just a slight change in letterhead. However, KKR isn’t a media …

While searching for something else, I stumbled across this announcement of the Kaye Ballard Peanuts album in the Chicago Sunday Times Magazine for January 15, 1961. Now, let’s take a zoom in on that drawing… and its caption. Magazine sections are generally created with a long lead time, allowing them to …

I publish things. I also research things. And really, the two efforts are often one and the same: I research stuff and find that it’s worth publishing; I publish stuff and in the process I’m doing research. That all just happened for me with a syndicated comics panel called “Spot” …

A couple months ago, I posted about some research I’d done into the use of putting the title of a comic strip right in the strip on dailies. Believe it or not, that bit of digging in has already led to me publishing a book…. a reprint of a 1945 …

I have mentioned before about how in 1970 the classic Peanuts Cook Book was removed from schools and a replacement recipe offered because the Lucy’s Lemon Lollipops recipe used lemon extract. I had incorrectly assumed that the problems was that kids might sample the extract and get sloshed. Nope. Turns out, …

Benjamin L. Clark, my august collaborator on the lengthy-named and well-received Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects, reminds me that the Peanuts corner title box was not actually printed on to the art boards used to draw Peanuts for the first several …

If you’ve seen early Peanuts strips in old newspaper clippings, certain reprints, or even certain reprints, you’ll have seen that the name of the strip is printed in the upper left corner of the strip — indeed, printed right onto the original art board that Schulz used. “What,” you may …

When I posted yesterday about Peanuts appearing in Spanish in an English language Pomona, California paper in the 1970s, I had already intended to follow up by finding the very start of this, and seeing if the paper carried some explanation. (Could I have waited on the original post before …

I just discovered that for some reason, in the mid-1970s, The Pomona, California newspaper Progress Bulletin began running Peanuts in Spanish, with English subtitles. Let me be clear that this is something that they did only with Peanuts; not only are there no other comic strips so subtitled, there is …

While most of the Peanuts characters would not appear until 1950 or later, Sally Brown shows up in this ad from 1934!