from the Mendecino Coast Beacon, June 4, 1965

Here’s a quiz for you: imagine you, like AAUGH Blog reader Douglas, got a copy of a new boxed set of Peanuts books, and it had this marking on the box…. Now, first pretend that you (unlike Douglas) don’t know anything about Peanuts books. How many books do you think come …

The alert… well the overly-alert… Peanuts reader knows that Pigpen’s name changed over the years, not in pronunciation, but in punctuations. When the character first appeared, his name would be written as… ‘PIG-PEN’ …but when 1958 rolled around, those single-quote marks got expanded into double quotes. “PIG-PEN” That format lasted …

So I heard from the curator of the Schulz Museum, the one and only Benjamin L. Clark (oh, okay, those are common names, so there’s probably at least several Benjamin L. Clarks, but only one is the curator of the Schulz Museum. I assume.) He let me know that the …

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 …

Friend-of-the-blog Tim Chow calls attention to the final panel from the March 2, 1986 Sunday strip, as reproduced in the just-released volume 8 of Peanuts Every Sunday. That hourglass, well it isn’t going to work. It’s too full of sand. All the sand of an hourglass has to fit in …