What we have learned during stay at home orders and the closing of Snoopy's Home Ice, Snoopy's Gallery & Gift Shop and the Charles M. Schulz Museum is we can serve our members, visitors, customers and fans on the internet.
The Schulz Museum has offered a variety of free and fee classes and activities, and we have books to supplement these interests from our collection at Snoopy’s Gallery and Gift Shop.
The most coveted and most complete series for the Peanuts fan is the Fantagraphics Collection - containing every comic strip from the 50 years of Schulz's work. Each volume covers 2 years with an introduction from such notable fans as Walter Cronkite, Whoopi Goldberg, Billie Jean King and President Barack Obama! The books come in both hard and soft cover. You may choose your favorite year, or work towards collecting the latest of 26 volumes of 1959-2000 curation of Schulz’s rare, Peanuts art: storybooks and comic book stories.
One of the other books I recommend to people wanting to understand more about Charles M. Schulz and his work is the Conversations series by Thomas Inge. With the help of Creative Associates, Inge curated over 300 interviews and articles, selecting 18. The first - Hugh Morrow’s 1956 article begins with “Charles Monroe Schulz started his rise to success at an early age by flunking every subject in the eighth grade.” Morrow also shares that 10 years later, from Charles Schulz’s school years memories of failure, he created Charlie Brown, the epitome of non-achievement. Inge has also edited My Life with Charlie Brown.
Peanuts fans always like to get to the nitty-gritty and Derrick Bang's book 50 Years of Happiness is a great place to start. It is filled with facts about the strips and a chronology of all the characters. Sparky once said, "Derrick knows more about Peanuts than I do."
The Peanuts Papers is a unique collection of stories, memories and commentary from over 30 writers that will warm the hearts of those steeped in Peanut as well as the casual readers of the comic strip. From the esoteric Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the popular Ann Patchett's The Dutch House and Maxine Hong Kingston's I Love a Broad Margin to My Life readers will find essays to delight and educate them about all manner of human interest.
Peanuts Guide to Life is an everyday book with the selections on Life Skills, Peanuts Wisdom, Self Confidence and the Place of Effort in life: Linus tells Lucy at the breakfast table, "John Ruskin once wrote, 'The best grace is the consciousness that we have earned our dinner.'" and of course there is a section on Love!
Snoopy for President - The elements of the comic strip come together in this entertaining book. Lucy wants her brother Linus to run for class president, but a glitch appears when he discovers his friend Pig Pen is running. Violet and Schroder are the reporter and photographer covering the election. I think everyone will be happy with the election results. SnoopyGift.com is offering free shipping on this soft cover book for you to share.