Book rummage - 4: The Wonderful World Of Peanuts

Just because you (still) always see these around, doesn't make them any the less genius.

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PEANUTS
by Charles Schulz
(Coronet, 1st pub 1952-4, 1971 reprint)
Peanuts means different things to different people. One of us used to think he was missing out on something because the strips weren’t always funny, but always stuck with it because he loved Snoopy. He was also convinced even back then that most of the characters were gay, and Pig Pen reminded him of a kid in his class. When his year had its school Jubilee pageant and they had to come up with something to celebrate the Queen’s 25-year reign, he came up with a Peanuts play and played Charlie Brown. It wasn’t very British, but what the hell. He got to duck a baseball bat in the school hall. To another of us, peanuts are a very tasty snack. She liked watching it on TV, as a cartoon with all those weird off-camera mumbled adult voices, and had a tweeting Woodstock toy on a spring that bounced up and down. She also owned a Snoopy toy, but he was just a stuffed dog really. To the third, Peanuts is simply one of the finest newspaper cartoon strips ever – on a par with Calvin And Hobbes, Little Nemo and Krazy Kat – certainly up to the end of the Sixties. If allowed, he would burble on for hours about Peanuts, about how, within its deceptively simple, childlike parade of characters and interactions, you can see reflected the early alienation and neuroses of America’s babyboomer generation, and how it offers insights into the human psyche no other medium has ever achieved, but fortunately we’re not going to allow him the space. Before Peanuts, no one went to the psychiatrist. All right then, it just makes him laugh. This particular book is a very fine example of Schulz’s craft, being from the early years when the characters were still fresh and naïve (even Lucy) and the sight of Snoopy fighting the Red Baron on top of his doghouse and the kite-eating tree were but distant gleams in Schulz’s imagination. There are more visual gags here than later readers might be used to – Snoopy balancing two pitchers of water on his ears, Snoopy licking a baby Linus – and the humour is much more upfront, untouched mainly by the cares of the world. Thoroughly recommended.
Cost: 75p
Bargain value: 8 (early run of top notch cartoon strip, increasingly scarce)
Cover: 9 (classic Schulz)
Author’s authenticity count: 10 (he the man!)