The AAUGH Blog

I’m trying to catch up on my stray books here, but there’s one that I had a problem with when I first went to take care of it, and that problem was… it didn’t seem to exist. I mean, I had a copy of it, because my wife stumbled across it at a bookstore, but Amazon hadn’t heard of it. The website for the store where my wife found it, a Barnes & Noble, doesn;t have it. The book doesn’t have an ISBN number anywhere on it to search. It’s a recent book, copyright 2025, but it was defying the laws of…

A recent addition to the AAUGH.com Reference Library is スヌーピー折り紙, a book of Peanuts origami projects. However, achieving hte results they show takes more than folding and connecting pieces of paper, as they want you to add faces and other markings to the pieces, which means you’ll have channel your inner Schulz a bit. This book costs about $9 in Japan. If you buy it at one of the US Kinokuniya stores (which is how my copy was acquired), you can expect to put out about $24 bucks for it… but it…

I have been falling behind in listing and reviewing the books that have come in to the AAUGH.com Reference Library. This is in part because I’m busy making several books (including one Peanuts-related one), in part because there are a bunch of board books that came in at roughly the same time, and my buying board books is more a sign that I’m a completist than that I have passion for the individual item. (That’s not a complaint. These books are not aimed at me. They should not be aimed at me.…

Apple TV has announced another new Peanuts special, a Christmas special coming our way this Christmas season. I’m going to spare myself some effort and just drop down the relevant portions of their press release, so the editorialization you see is all theirs. Apple TV is making the season merry and bright with holiday programming for the whole family, led by the all-new Peanuts special, “Snoopy Presents: 12 Days of Snoopy,” premiering Friday, November 13. In the latest special under the…

Most years, Hallmark has a book edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Often, it’s just a tweak on a previous edition. This year’s listing has popped up. It’s a book with sound buttons that also interacts with a stuffed Snoopy figure, which makes its own sounds as part of the reading. And if that sounds and looks exactly like last year’s edition, yup. (It’s the one that I chided for having Snoopy make sound effects during the reading of the Gospel.) Only there’s one thing: the description says…

Coming out in December is a facsimile edition of Detective Comics issue 500, the big thick issue-versary release from 1981. Detective Comics is a series that began in 1937, although it really picked up steam in 1939, when issue 27 introduced a little character called “The Batman”. Reaching issue 500 is an achievement for any monthly, and a thick comic with seven short stories — including one written by the creator of The Shadow — seemed just what was called for. I bought this one off of the…

I give up too quickly. A couple weeks after I wrote to the address that I found for 1956’s Peanut of the Year Ruth Figi, I reckoned the note had not reached her. The internet has a lot of out of date addresses for people who have since moved or died. Or perhaps she had just chosen to ignore the answer. So, I published my blog post about the Peanuts of the Year contest. Ruth Figi (center) and friend at an arts event, 2023. Courtesy Ruth Figi, all rights reserved, not for reuse. It turns out that…

In 1956, the Minneapolis Star newspaper ran a contest for “Peanut of the Year”, asking parents or kids themselves to submit letters of 150 words or fewer of whey a certain 5 to 10 year old was like a Peanuts character, or deserved to be part of the cast. The winner, eight year old Ruth Ida Figi (who you can see here) had been having an interesting year; on January 4th, she had broken her leg in a ski accident, so I guess she was already in a cast. It’s the awarding of the prize that caught my…

The Anderson Museum of Art in lovely (I’ll assume) Anderson, Indiana has an interesting exhibition coming up next month…. It focuses on artists from Indiana, and look at all the cool things it covers, There’s Garfield! And Baby Blues! Blondie! Marvin! But… there’s no Snoopy. What’s it doing on this blog? That center square in the bottom row? That’s from Young Pillars, Schulz’s single-panel cartoon series for Christian publications from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. “But Schulz isn’t from…

My snoopysense went off while watching Repo Man, the offbeat punk sci-fi flick from 1984. About seven-and-a-half minutes in, titular star Emilio Estevez is silhouetted in a doorway, and on the door across the hall, there’s Charlie Brown! That’s part of a line of banners from the 1970s… in fact, it’s this one: Image swiped from a current eBay listing, if someone wants to buy it. The quote and image on the banner come from the May 24, 1967 Peanuts strip.

The two latest board books to arrive are both based around material from somewhere else. It’s Hockey Time, Franklin takes the storybook of the same name by Jason Cooper and Scott Jeralds and reformats it as a board book shaped around the image of a hockey puck. The formatting is a cute effort, but it makes the actual pages seem weird, with text often put into curved space, and with the picture looking like you’re staring at it through binoculars. The story is, well, this is really more story…

In recent years, Snoopy has been very successful in getting blood donors, particularly first-time blood donors (and you never have ongoing blood donors unless you have that first one.) The American Red Cross has run multiple campaigns offering special Peanuts t-shirts to donors, and the response has been strong (and seems to have led to further such efforts; one member of my family has signed up for their first donation to get a Hello Kitty item that’s being offered.) But these recent events…

I meant to write a review of Snoopy Presents: There’s No Place Like Home, Snoopy, the new special on Apple TV that is so powerful, Snoopy’s in the name twice! But life is full, so I will just note that it’s watchable, and it does have the Goose Eggs in it. Those of you into the smallest humans in the Peanuts cast or who just like seeing the diversity within Peanuts embraced will be glad to get your dose of Milo. Even if you’re not watching Ted Lasso, if you are a Peanuts completist and have…

In 1958, the vocal jazz/pop band The Hi-Lo’s were riding high. Having released their first album in 1954, they were already working on their eighth… and they wanted to name it after a Peanuts book. As the Washington D.C. newspaper The Sunday Star reported, they were floating the idea of naming their next album Good Grief, More Hi-Lo’s, a reference to the book Good Grief, More Peanuts that had come out less than two years before. They even talked about trying to reach out to Schulz to provide a…

In 1961, Charles Schulz designed a promotional character for the United Fund (i.e., the group that is now called United Way.) He gets named “Little Angel”… or, depending on the press release, “Little Good Guy”. The character appears in promotions for a few years. The reworks of him, which are often locally done, vary in quality. This version appears to be still all Schulz, but Franksteined — they’ve copied one side of the body and flipped it to make the other. Hand sticking up out of the back.

Just added to the AAUGH.com Reference Library is this volume that my daughter and wife (two separate people, let me be clear) found at Kinokuniya, a chain selling Japanese books at eighteen US locations. This paperback, which bears no English title as some Japanese books do, has a title that translates to Not Just Mean Lucy. This is a Lucy-themed strip collection built around the color pink. Black-and-white daily strips are now black-and-white-and-pink. Color Sunday strips? Also now…

As some of you know, the color collection of Schulz’s late-1950s newspaper feature It’s Only a Game that I published in 2013 is a bit weird — namely, the book’s spine is not on the left, as with a normal English book. No, the spine is on the top, and you have to turn pages by flipping them up from the bottom, like a calendar. Well, I’ve finally managed to publish a less-weird edition of this material… it’s the same comics, the same commentary by Schulz’s assistant on the series Jim Sasseville,…

The board book Letters to the Great Pumpkin is fairly straightforward on its goals. Linus decides that a letter-writing campaign is just the thing to get that legendary gourd to appear in his pumpkin patch, and various Peanuts characters each write a letter to the Great Pumpkin that reflects their personality (well, one writes the Great Grape.) The letters can be pulled partially out of slots in the book so that they can be read. I reckon that with a good tug, they can be pulled all the way…

Thursday was all about the San Diego Comic-Con for me… woke up at 4 AM, drove down to Anaheim, caught the first train from there to San Diego, walked from the train station to the convention center, spent most of my time there walking around the convention center, then walked to a restaurant for dinner, then to the train station to catch the last train back to Anaheim, then a drive home. A very weary AAUGH Blogger got home at 1:23 AM, stuck the key in the door, and promptly broke the key when…

I’ve finally got the line-up of things that will be at the Peanuts shop at Comic-Con… but before I get to that, let me note that my Comic-Con plans have changed, and I will now be there only on Thursday. If anyone wants to mee with me, it can probably be arranged; drop me a line. It looks like this year’s Peanuts shop (and remember, this is the one inside the convention, with a totally different set of items than the one outside) will be focused on board-riding, whether Surf or Skate. Ya got…

The famous San Diego Comic-Con is just a couple weeks away, and if you were hoping to go but don’t have tickets yet, well, you’re far too late. These sell out months in advance. (But if you happen to be in San Diego during this time, keep reading, there’s some information for you.) Information is still coming out, so I expect to be adding to this later, but this is what we know so far of Peanuts-y plans there: PANEL: On Thursday at 1 PM in Room 5, it’s “Good Grief! The Enduring Legacy of…

We just purchased a (used) display case, so it finally became time to put together the set of Japanese Snoopy’s Book Cafe miniatures that I’d purchased a couple years back. Rather than using the two-pieces-of-cardboard backdrop that comes with the set, we purchased a larger, plastic set of walls and floors, and my daugther (who did most of the assembly) painted it. The set came with little plastic “books”, some permanently closed, others that are permanently open (and you used stickers to put…

I can think of a number of times that Peanuts storybooks have been converted into board books, often with some shortening and simplification. And I can think of once or twice that the stories from board books have been included inside non-board anthologies of stories. But I can’t think of any case where a board book was converted into a stand-alone non-board book… until now. Coming in January is a non-board edition of Be Kind, Be Brave, Be You! The original board book edition came out in 2018,…

We’ve got the first listed Peanuts book for 2027, and while it’s a board book for kids, it’s going to have something for all you Freida fans. In Snoopy’s Bunny Fun!, Freida wants Snoopy to go after rabbits, but Snoopy has other plans. And if bunnies are your thing, January also brings It’s Easter Snoopy!, a coloring and activity book with crayons.

First, let me note that the Great Pumpkin Carols book which I talked about a while back is now available for preorder. And while I’m doing that, I’ll remind you both that when you preorder, Amazon will give you the lowest price they list the book for between now and when it’s released (often a bit of a savings)… and I’ll also remind you that The AAUGH Blog makes a little bit of income every time you click through on one of these links and order something. Yes, there is some underlying…

I just picked up a copy of The World According to Snoopy, which was released in the UK late last year. This hardcover book, with its cover akin to a 1970s textbook, falls into the “inspirational messages” category. It’s pages are a mix of single-page displays of individual Peanuts strips (always in black-and-white) with pages that work more as mini-posters, with a quote from a Peanuts character at bottom and an image of that character (which kinda matches the quote but which is probably not…

I got interviewed about Peanuts on the WHI Podcast, which is normally a political podcast… which is why, perhaps, we end up talking about the polarization of the nation, now and in the past, within the context of the popularity of the Peanuts strip. Watch and see why I should never do another video podcast until I choose to regrow my beard! https://youtu.be/izv_9Jj0GUY

The legal goings-on this week regarding Peanuts require a bit of a preface: while Peanuts Worldwide (or really Peanuts Holdings) owns Peanuts, they don’t own everything Peanuts. Lee Mendelson Film Productions has rights regarding the classic TV and film material. If I understand correctly (and that’s a real caveat, there are so many things in this world that I don’t understand), they own the rights to all that great Vince Guaraldi music, both the rights to the compositions (i.e., what you see…

The folks at Apple TV (they have dropped the plus-sign) just announced a batch of news for Peanuts animation fans, featuring both offering up more old content and premiering some new material. June 26: a new season of Camp Snoopy drops. July 3: added to the package is This Is America, Charlie Brown, the eight-episode miniseries from 1988 that uses the Peanuts characters to explore American history. (That show about the Mayflower that you ight have seen after an airing of A Charlie Brown…

One of the odd things about being a Peanuts book collector is when looking for books in Japanese, when you’ll discover that “book” gets rather broadly defined. If it can be packed into a rectangle, it may get distributed as a book. Generally, it’s items that can be well-flattened — bags and cases of various sorts are the most common.