Kim Thompson gives us a little preview of the fifth volume in the Complete Peanuts series. He also writes to me…
I too collected the Holt, Rinehart books religiously as a teenager and ended up with at least the first 20 –most of those original copies are still sitting under "S" in the Fantagraphics library, in fact– and to be honest, if my house was burning down and I had to choose between the HR books and the new Fanta books I might very well pick the HR ones myself, even though they omit part of the opening Sunday panel and are missing a bunch of strips, etc. I think all Peanuts fans my age and older have a permanent sentimental attachment to those books.
The matter of which strips were "killed" by Schulz or anyone else for later reproduction is endlessly intriguing. Based on the fact that (as we've found out) there are significant holes in both United Feature Syndicate and the Schulz Estate's files of proofs, it's possible that some of the missing strips are missing simply because they didn't have any copies of them when they were putting together the HR books. (I particularly suspect this is the case when an entire week's worth of perfectly good strips were never reprinted.) As for the others…
I recently picked out several examples from our upoming fifth volume — strips that have never, so far as I (and, more importantly, my cadre of Peanuts experts) know, been collected since their ephemeral appearance in daily newspapers around the world nearly 50 years ago — and offered a few educated guesses as to why that might be.
Those are the ones posted at the above link and it gets me to wondering: Does anyone have any solid info on how the Holt, Rinehart books sold? And more interestingly, how did they impact the syndication of Peanuts? I know there have been cases where a top-selling reprint collection prompted a lot of editors to say, "Hey, that strip's popular. We'd better pick it up for our paper." That was a big factor in the success of Garfield and Dilbert, and I think maybe with Doonesbury, as well. Also, both Charles Schulz and Lee Mendelson told me how the popularity of A Charlie Brown Christmas (which Mendelson produced) had an astronomical impact on the merchandising of the characters. Does anyone know if the rise of Peanuts to 2600+ newspaper clients was slow and steady or if it spiked because of the books and/or TV special?