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A certain number of bookmarks have accumulated in the iPad reader application for one of my library’s ebook (and other digital works) lending services. If they’re for “series,” changes in their thumbnails reveal new items available there. I did bookmark a recent line of “Peanuts comics,” but haven’t read a lot of them. They did a better job for me of imitating Charles M. Schulz’s hard-to-imitate artwork than some earlier efforts (including the animated specials themselves), but in treading the narrow path of “being like the strip” their stories might not have wound up that interesting. After letting the whole application sit for a while, though, on starting it up I was surprised by the latest thumbnail for that bookmark. It was now the cover of an old reprint book; my thoughts went to the facsimile editions. That in itself wasn’t quite enough to get me to sign out the digital comic (I should have all of the reprint books from the 1960s, to say nothing of the more complete “Complete Peanuts” volumes), but not that long afterwards I checked the application again and saw a different thumbnail. This time, it was one of the old “Peanuts Parade” books from the late 1970s. I’d seen a few of in them my youth (and bought a few used in the years since), but this wasn’t one of them. The facsimile project having jumped so far ahead was enough to get my attention. With the online strips now in the middle of that decade and a desk calendar reprinting daily strips from fifty years ago, the thought of managing a different experience was now enough to get me to sign the book out.
As I worked my way through “And A Woodstock In A Birch Tree,” I went from strips I still wasn’t altogether familiar with to the sudden realization I had seen the middle third of the book as a smaller Fawcett Crest paperback I’d been given years and years ago, getting to familiar stories like another visit from Spike, the introduction of Eudora, and Snoopy cutting notches into his doghouse. After that dose of nostalgia, I did at least get back to more unfamiliar territory with the last third of the book. While conscious throughout of thoughts like “late in the Silver Age” (if there’s such a thing), the unexpected offering did make for a change and remind me I could take any one of the Complete Peanuts volumes off a bookshelf at any time.
As I worked my way through “And A Woodstock In A Birch Tree,” I went from strips I still wasn’t altogether familiar with to the sudden realization I had seen the middle third of the book as a smaller Fawcett Crest paperback I’d been given years and years ago, getting to familiar stories like another visit from Spike, the introduction of Eudora, and Snoopy cutting notches into his doghouse. After that dose of nostalgia, I did at least get back to more unfamiliar territory with the last third of the book. While conscious throughout of thoughts like “late in the Silver Age” (if there’s such a thing), the unexpected offering did make for a change and remind me I could take any one of the Complete Peanuts volumes off a bookshelf at any time.