Snoopy is one of the very first books I remember having on my childhood bedroom bookshelf. It was this book, though not this exact copy. This is a replacement copy I picked up after having nostalgia pangs and realizing I should never have divested myself of the original copy.
I had this book at least as early as 1978, when we were living in Clayton, New Jersey. It's very possible I got the original copy at a book fair or from one of those classroom order forms. That would make sense, given that this was a Weekly Reader Books publication.
Snoopy was first published in 1958. It must have remained quite popular and gone through many printings over the years and decades. This Holt, Reinhart and Winston/Weekly Reader Books edition doesn't have a specific publication date on the copyright page, but there's a 10-digit
ISBN listed. I believe that means this hardcover edition must have been published in 1970 or thereafter.
As the cover portends, this book is devoted solely to four-panel Peanuts cartoons from the 1950s that feature
Snoopy, Charlie Brown's beloved dog.
Charles M. Schulz's
Peanuts launched as a newspaper comic strip in 1950, so the iconic characters were still in their formative stages during that first decade. And some hadn't even arrived yet.
As
Ewomack notes in a 2018 review on Amazon, in this book we get to see "Snoopy thinking, running, needing a toe clipping, doing tricks, rolling his empty water dish, chasing snowflakes, stealing blankets, frolicking, dancing on pianos, running from weeds, calling children 'idiots,' doing imitations, avoiding worms on the sidewalk, sitting on croquet poles, confusing leaves for potato chips and bumping into things. Snoopy represented a form of comic liberation for readers. He often did whatever he wanted to and pretty much always got away with it. He also provided a canine perspective on human activity, a skewed lens through which we could evaluate our own often silly behavior."
The readers and Snoopy also get to witness a pretty amazing moment, if you're familiar with Charlie Brown's fortunes kicking the football. Lucy had already established herself as Charlie Brown's football-holding nemesis in the early 1950s, so maybe Charlie Brown should have just stuck with Schroeder.
As a copy editor, the thing I'm most appreciative about with regard to Snoopy is the "I Before E Except After C" song from the 1969 Peanuts film
A Boy Named Charlie Brown. That has helped me with many spelling double-checks over the years.
Peanuts is a Linus-comfort-blanket of a comic strip for many Boomers and members of Generation X, such as myself. It would be nice to have a digital-free weekend getaway to a cabin in the woods and take along one of those hefty The Complete Peanuts hardcovers, perhaps encompassing the strips of the early or mid 1960s.
But for now I'm just fine with my little Snoopy hardcover.
Fiona Fluffington is bored by Snoopy. This week I learned that she really likes grated parmesan on her food.