Peanuts ─ The Art of Charles M. Schulz

A national best-seller and winner of the 2002 Eisner Award for the best comics-related book, Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz is now in paperback, with thirty-two pages of additional material from the newly formed archives of the Charles M. Schulz Museum. Author/designer Chip Kidd and photographer Geoff Spear revisited the Peanuts vault and found newly discovered treasures, including: rare ephemera from the very first Peanuts licensees; the first Peanuts comic book from 1952, featuring rare, early strips in color; the script and storyboards for a 1960 Ford Falcon TV commerical that marked the first Peanuts animation; and a long-lost and recently restored mural painted by Schulz in 1951 for his daughter's bedroom, which features early versions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
This fresh material has been added to the book People magazine called "a compilation to treasure," a compendium of more than five hundred comic strips, development sketches, and personal scrapbooks that, the Los Angeles Times noted, "features beautiful photographs of original artwork and vintage newsprint, and thereby manages to capture the texture of Schulz's comic art in all its benday-dot glory."
This newly expanded edition continues the celebration of one of the most revered cartoonists of our time, and is a must for anyone who has come under the spell of Peanuts.

Charles M. Schulz was born in 1922 in Minneapolis, the only child of a housewife and a barber. His interest in comics was encouraged by his father, who loved the funny pages. After army duty, Schulz lettered comic pages for Timeless Topix, and sold seventeen cartoons to The Saturday Evening Post from 1948 to 1950 and a feature, Li'l Folks, to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Peanuts debuted on October 2, 1950, and ran without interruption for the next fifty years. Schulz died on February 12, 2000, and his last strip ran the next day. Peanuts has appeared in 2,600 newspapers in seventy-five countries.


From the Hardcover edition.