An Anniversary Resumption

I managed to see some reminders that October 2 was the seventieth anniversary of the first Peanuts comic strip appearing in a handful of newspapers. Seventy years feels like a long time, and yet I got to wondering about “rates of change” (and changes I might have missed that matter nevertheless for other people) and what the world had been like seventy years before the strip appeared; for one thing, comic strips hadn’t been around back then. I suppose I did think a bit how I’d managed to find a copy of “The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,” which had been in my high school library, at a used book sale just a few years ago, and found most of the comics from before 1930 or so hard to get through in large part because their lettering looked so crude.

Beyond the first matter of “seventy years,” I did remember it’s been a bit more than twenty years now since the strip came to an end, and supposed that it’s still remembered might count for something. (A while later, though, I did remember it’s closing in on twenty-five years since Calvin and Hobbes reached a conclusion in somewhat different circumstances, and that strip doesn’t have the spinoffs that might help Peanuts be remembered.) With all of this, I wondered if there’d be anything on “The AAUGH Blog,” and went there to notice something different. The “facsimile editions” of the old Holt, Rinehart and Winston books that had appeared five years ago and just got into the 1960s are promised to start reappearing again next year. Beyond that I have a complete set of “The Complete Peanuts” with strips that weren’t reprinted at the time, I’ve managed to collect three copies of “Sunday’s Fun Day, Charlie Brown” (in the tête-bêche Mattel edition) over the years, so I probably don’t need another copy; the thought of “an indulgence” can get to me all the same.