When the Peanuts cartoon strip was born October 2, 1950, just seven papers picked it up. By the end of cartoonist Charles Schulz's career in 2000, over 2,500 newspapers carried what had become one of the most popular comics works ever produced. More than 500 daily and Sunday comics, a generous array of previously unseen drawings and a multitude of evolutionary sketches and artifacts are reproduced in full color throughout Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz (Pantheon, Oct.). "This is the first book since his death to look at the entire scope of his work," says senior editor Shelley Wanger. "Everything was shot from the original, whether it was a newspaper clipping or an original sketch, which even provides a sense of the paper's texture." The artist himself assesses the personalities of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy and his other characters as well as some of the individual strips. Wanger adds, "Charles Schulz understood Americans incredibly well, and he portrayed us with wit, humor and irony." Edited and designed by Chip Kidd, the retrospective also includes an introduction by Jean Schulz, who explains her late husband's success: "Sparky was a genius." Pantheon has announced a 175,000 first printing.
An artist with vastly different characteristics who similarly attracted a fiercely devoted band of enthusiasts was Edward Gorey, who also died last year. Harcourt's new celebration of him and his work is the aptly titled Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (Oct.), edited by Karen Wilkin, the curator and art critic who co-authored The World of Edward Gorey. "This is a self-portrait," says Wilkin. "It is a collection of interviews with Edward Gorey by various people over a period of 25 years. They are arranged chronologically to show Edward at his most frivolous and Edward at his most remarkable, demonstrating the great depth and breath of his mind." Asked what lay behind Gorey's popularity with sophisticated readers, which grew from his initial book, The Unstrung Harp, published by Duell, Sloan & Pearce in 1953, Wilkin says, "Part of it is the wit and obliqueness of the text, and part is the inventiveness of the drawings. Another reason is that they function on so many levels and are so full of fleeting little allusions as he parodies things and reinvents things. To describe Edward as an illustrator or cartoonist is hopelessly inadequate." Gorey drawings dance through the text, and Wilkin notes, "We also reproduced his first drawing, done when he was one-and-a-half, which had been saved by his mother." Harcourt's first printing will be 50,000 copies.
