The book I wrote with Peanuts fan extraordinaire Nat Gertler has been nominated for a Will Eisner Award by the people who bring you Comic-Con International in San Diego each year! Voting has closed for the comics publishing industry award, but it’s been a thrill just to be nominated. I’ve never won an award and tended to roll my eyes at the idea of being grateful for a nomination, but I get it now. This is a recognition of the hard work of *so many* people. I’m so proud and grateful to my team at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, our publishers Weldon-Owen, and all the fans of Charles M. Schulz, who have supported the museum and all do a part in preserving and sharing the legacy of Charles Schulz and Peanuts.
Of course, the book is still available everywhere that good books are sold, and proceeds support the Schulz Museum. You can also buy the book directly from the Schulz Museum, which is a way to support the museum doubly. You can even leave a note when you purchase to request that I sign it, and I’m happy to do that.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
If you’re a fan of newspaper comics and letterpress printing and live in the North Bay Area, you won’t want to miss a special event hosted by the North Bay Letterpress Arts organization on Saturday, April 22nd. The “Sunday Funnies” event will feature a conversation with Benjamin L. Clark (me), Maia Kobabe, and Andrew Mecum, the Executive Director of NBLA, about the relationship between printing, comics, and beyond.
Maia Kobabe, who was once a member of NBLA, is an accomplished author and artist who has created beautiful books. Eir graphic novel, Gender Queer, has been widely banned (boo!), bringing em major media attention, interviews, (and a new book deal).
In addition to the conversation, there will be a short movie about the subject, live printing demonstrations, and fundraising party tricks. All guests will be treated to coffee from Retrograde, tea, donuts, and other fun snacks throughout the event.
This year, the month of May is also a memorial tribute to Dennis Renault, a political cartoonist and letterpress printer who sold Eric Johnson his iron hand press. Unfortunately, Renault passed away last fall. Examples of his work will be on display at the event, showcasing his life and legacy that perfectly embodies the spirit and wit of the “Sunday Funnies” event.
The event will take place at the North Bay Letterpress Arts studio, located at 925-D Gravenstein Hwy S, in Sebastopol, California. Doors will open at 4:00 PM, with the event ending at 6:30 PM. Sliding scale donations will be accepted in person at the event, or you can donate ahead of time online. Be sure to leave a note that it’s for the event or email the organizers.
All proceeds from the event will support the mission of NBLA, which is to democratize letterpress, lower the barrier of entry, and create more access for a wider audience, especially youth in the community. This year, NBLA is generously supported by a grant from the California Arts Council, along with support from local sponsors such as Sonoma County Libraries, the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, the Cartoon Art Museum, Blackwing pencils, and Retrograde Coffee.
Join us for an afternoon of fascinating insights into the world of newspaper comics and letterpress printing while supporting a great cause. We hope to see you there!
NB: This post was partially written with ChatGPT tools.
Half Price Books with the new sign going up in OKC, March 2009. Photo by the author
This Texas chain was known to me, but I had never lived in a city to have one. I must have first visited one of these clean, bright stores with the big red signs in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area at some point when I lived in Lubbock and got to the big city for a visit. I was thrilled when HPB announced they would open their first store in Oklahoma City. I don’t think the bookshop owners felt that way, though. This first store was (and still is, I assume), at 63rd and May Ave.
Half Price Books is a very different kind of bookshop. It is mostly used books, but they also carry a sizeable percentage of remainders of otherwise new books from publishers. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, remainders are the printing over-runs, the returns, and the unsold stock publishers always have. Publishing is a highly speculative industry, and publishers often end up with too many books they need to deal with. Bibliophiles dream of having a high-quality, high-turnover shop nearby. They may not have the particular book you need, but they’ll often have something of interest at a decent price. Half Price Books is not the stop to make when looking for a missing link in your collection, though collectible books do show up there.
What else is nice is that Half Price Books staffs a buyer’s counter in their stores to look up books in their database and make an offer. Yes, it’s pennies on the dollar, and no, they don’t put an offer on everything, but they will take everything and dispose of it. Frankly, when you have more books than you know what to do with or no time to deal with, is a lifesaver.
At least, the buy counter was once my life-saver. While living in Oklahoma City (and working for the Oklahoma Historical Society), I went to an auction. It was a strange auction made up of huge lots of old clocks and watches, antique fishing gear, other antique outdoors equipment, and books. Tens of thousands of books, easily. A colleague at OHS alerted me to the sale, knowing my interest in old books. He was mostly going for the fishing and outdoors, but also out of curiosity.
One of my major finds from that auction was featured in the book Rare Books Uncovered by Rebecca Rego Barry, which tells the story of my discovery of a book that had once been part of the Vatican’s library, printed in 1536 in its contemporary binding. Good stuff. Another part of that story is what came with that one little book (seriously, it fits in a pocket) — over a thousand other books. It weighed down my SUV so badly I was worried about the brakes on the drive home. I had a difficult time getting one of the doors to stay latched so I could hit the power locks.
Sorting that load of books into things I wanted to keep, fairly valuable books that needed to be sold via ebay to get a good result, and then a couple of small piles to send to specialists and put aside for friends. After that, there were still hundreds and hundreds of other good used books. These are what I took to Half Price Books. I had no time or storage space to sell all of that myself online. It takes a lot of work to sell books online, even for a single book, to photograph it well, write up a detailed description, answer questions, etc. So, a couple of safer car loads to Half Price Books, and I had enough cash to cover rent that month from book sales, making a sizeable profit over what I had spent at the auction. And I still had special books to sell online and a few lovely things to keep.
Having a buyer at the ready, and able to buy at a scale most local shops cannot and needing enormous amounts of books in stock and keeping it constantly rotating with reasonable prices at their many stores — it seems an excellent addition to a local ecosystem of books and people who love them. I’ve always liked HPB, anyway.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
It’s hard to believe, but I had a book come out on November 1st! You can get it anywhere good books are sold, but if you buy it from the Charles M. Schulz Museum, it will be signed by none other than Jean Schulz!
Working with Jeannie on the book was a very special experience. I get to work with her quite a bit developing exhibitions for the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, and for Snoopy Museum Tokyo, and she’s always happy to pitch in with research — connecting me to contacts, making ID’s in photos, and sharing memories. But this was different. We got to reflect on Sparky as an entire person together and dig into various parts of his life and personality we’ve not done a lot about at the museum for whatever reasons.
The book is almost like a visit to the Schulz Museum — 100 Objects from the museum’s collections are featured in gorgeous detailed photos, and a bit of history is shared about each, often with other supporting images of other objects that help tell the story. We also asked 50 contributors, from cartoonists, celebrities, politicians, friends, and members of the Schulz family, to share their own stories and remembrances related to these objects.
Interior spread from 100 Objects
All of us are very proud of the book, and I hope you will like it, too. It’s out just in time for the holiday gift-giving season, so if you know someone who loves Peanuts (and who doesn’t?), this is something a little different and totally new they will love. If you do buy a copy, be sure to rate and review it wherever you bought it, as it helps other fans find the book. Thank you!
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Full Circle Books is on the street level of the towering glass building at 50 Penn Place in Oklahoma City. 50 Penn Place is essentially a mall with a high-rise office tower added on top. It was a very high-end place to shop during the oil boom of the 1980s, but I believe there was some connection with a banking scandal not long after it opened. It was still nice in the early 2000s but perhaps no longer carried the clout the address once did. Full Circle is one of the few bookstores for new books I’ve included in this collection of essays. Bookstores dedicated to selling new books can feel cookie-cutter, sadly, without soul. Full Circle is simply better than nearly every other bookshop, including independent bookshops.
Despite, effectively, being in a mall filled with polished tile and dated chrome fixtures, this bookstore has a very charming atmosphere that feels apart. Antique shelves, rolling ladders, lots of wood, other vintage fixtures, worn rugs over hardwood floors, and plenty of comfortable seating. It all adds up to a welcome place in a bibliophile’s heart. The warm fireplaces, a cafe with wicker chairs, and strategically placed air-pots of complimentary house-blend coffee certainly don’t hurt either. At least, that’s how it was when I haunted this bookshop in the early 2000s. I was always sure to bring a travel mug along since everyone was welcome to help themselves and even encouraged to keep drinking their free coffee. It was wonderful.
The staff at Full Circle know their business, too. Professional booksellers who make excellent recommendations and charming selections to stock cannot be overpraised. The newsstand at Full Circle put the nearby Barnes & Noble to shame. Even the stationery selections were impressive. And you could always pick up a copy of the local alt-weekly, for better or worse. The one feature of the store that was already feeling unnecessary by the aughts was a sizeable selection of Lonely Planet and Frommer’s travel guides. A healthy travel section is a thing of beauty, but I would imagine the usefulness of these print guides was already waning by then.
Full Circle has a long history in the Oklahoma City area. I believe it started in Norman, home of the University of Oklahoma in OKC’s southern suburbs, but moved closer to the heart of the city in what was then fairly recent history.
The cafe was home to several regular book clubs, and the location for author visits. One memorable one for me was Ace Atkins, a mystery and thriller writer whose books I enjoyed. There wasn’t exactly a throng of people at his event in 2010, so there was time to make small talk. He asked about my work. I told him I worked for the Historical Society. He was interested in that, signing his book to me, “Keep history alive…” which was nice.
The cafe was also home to the regular meetings of my small writers’ group. By “my,” I mean the one in which I was the youngest, least experienced member. I was starting to write regularly for work, including educational materials and exhibition texts at the Oklahoma History Center, the flagship museum of the Oklahoma Historical Society, but I was just beginning to entertain the idea of writing for myself. The other four generous-hearted people in this group still mean a lot to me today, though I’ve neglected to keep up with everyone. And though it’s been over a decade since we met, I still wish we could.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Aladdin Book Shoppe in March 2009, (c) Photo by Benjamin L. Clark
One of the oldest used bookshops in Oklahoma, and since closed, Aladdin had the air of an old bookshop, though I guess it had not been in that final location for several decades. Yet, it had been there for a while when I started shopping there in early 2005, not long after moving to Oklahoma City.
I was fortunately hired at the Oklahoma Historical Society after graduate school to work at the newly opened Oklahoma History Center near the capitol building. Living on what was then the northwestern outskirts of Oklahoma City, I was excited to be decently employed, and have the means to occasionally buy books. Even collect books. I had been collecting for a few years by then, but now I could do so a little more seriously. I bought more bookshelves, and fortunately had space for them in my rented house (practically the intersection of 150th and Council Road).
Aladdin Books was a shop that took books seriously. Some used bookshops don’t take books all that seriously as objects. They are merely the commodity being sold. There may be a little romance tied up in them, but that just makes them more saleable. But at Aladdin, books were still special and a little magic. The staff were welcoming, had a good selection, and did not like me browsing into what I thought was just a section of Books About Books, but was their booksellers reference shelf. It wasn’t very clear where the store’s stock ended, and the reference shelf began, except it was near-ish the register, but not exactly blocked from public access and browsing. I do recall finding the first pirated Modern Library books I’ve ever seen in person. They were the big Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire two volume set by Gibbon. I never bought them, but I’d visit them from time to time. I think I let the Modern Library collectors list-serv know about them in case anyone wanted them, but there were no takers.
I eventually found Aladdin’s back room, which felt off-limits but wasn’t. Unlike the front of the store, which was full but tidy, it felt more like things were being processed in this back space. There were piles of boxes filled with books and sometimes other ephemera. Old issues of AB Bookman and other old bookseller catalogs were fun to browse. They also had shelves of the really old and battered things I like to look at. A shelf of Tom Swift and his imitators in fraying covers, ripped spine Bobbsey Twin runs, chart-topping fiction of the 1920s now completely forgotten, that sort of thing. They also had bound newspapers and other periodicals with red leather spines rotting away to dust, ready to stain your clothes if you got too close. This back room was my favorite part of the shop and a wonderful place to have a little space in the oppressive quiet, which was the norm here.
At the very front of the store was another smaller room. This was their “Rare Book Room” which had things that Kyle Hollingshead at Book Alley in Lubbock talked about — books that booksellers thought were rare for a long time, and then as more and, more of them moved online, discovered that a lot of them just weren’t that rare at all. I can’t remember looking in there much, or any specific things they had, but the glass cases were nice. I can vaguely recall some nice-to-look-at old children’s books.
I can’t recall any specific books that I bought from Aladdin, though I know I went there regularly in my time living in OKC. Their stock just didn’t move much, so I was less inclined to go very frequently.
Toward the end of my time in Oklahoma, Half-Price Books opened a shop a short drive north along the same arterial street that Aladdin was essentially on. The arrival of the discount used book behemoth no doubt signaled the beginning of the end for Aladdin.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Not a bookshop, but the book room of this thrift store was easily the most magical book place in Lubbock in the early 2000s. And, the prices were good too. I don’t recall exactly how what they were, but it could have been as cheap as a dime for paperbacks, a quarter for hardbacks. Maybe a quarter for paperbacks and fifty cents for hardbacks. All in all, very cheap, even back then.
This thrift store was on the tougher side of town in what had once been a service garage of some kind. They knocked a hole through one of the brick walls into another room and stacked it high with shelves, hung some big old dining room lights that a generous person would call chandeliers, and wired in some music. Usually, the local classical music/ jazz station played. Random art and posters were hung on any blank spots of the walls and rotated through regularly since they were priced cheaply. There was still crumbly brick in the doorway. It wasn’t finished or polished in any way. They always had interesting, strange things. One example that I still remember was a vintage diploma (or license, maybe?) for a Texas undertaker that I bought for under $1, surely, that sold well on ebay.
I loved browsing there for books for my own shelves and buying books for resale online. They had a steady stream of old copies of Modern Library books, which I collected. They always had far older stuff than the other thrift stores, and always had a lot to sift through. It was also here that I built the bulk of my collection of bookseller labels and bookbinder tickets. The older books that had these little treasures were often in such bad shape they could barely be called books still.
I was a regular, but I didn’t get to know any of the people working there beyond nodding acquaintance. No one seemed to work there very long. They didn’t care much about the books. The books were never sorted, and only rarely tidied up. A door to the outside was at one end of the book room, allowing outside air, and lots of dust, to come in through the rusty security gate that was always locked shut. I found some real treasures there, including a book I sold to a history of computing archive that paid my rent that month. They also kept very nice ephemera. I found some wonderful old travel booklets there from the later 1940s and early 1950s with early airlines and bygone passenger train photos.
My greatest find there however was probably the three or four years’ worth of back issues of a magazine called Firsts. If you’re not already familiar, Firsts started in the early 1990s and has survived the waves of change in the magazine publishing industry and is still published today. Their focus is entirely on collecting, and sharing detailed articles about collectible books. It’s essential reading and reference for collectors of modern fiction. This stack of knowledge was incredibly helpful to me, and I’m grateful instead of tossing them as pointless niche magazines, someone at the thrift store put them out because, “hey, you never know.” To my regret, I was very hard up and sold a few issues that I didn’t think would be as helpful. Back issues were already commanding premiums then.
There was another thrift store nearby that I always stopped in but almost never had anything good. They had good furniture, which I would occasionally flip or buy for myself, but for books — nearly nothing. I think someone sorted them in a rusty barrel with a rake, judging by condition. Freshly torn covers, a crazy high percentage with loose spines, and torn pages. I think I did score a big stack of the huge Walter Foster art instructions books there once, but that was it. Big lots of those used to sell on ebay, but you had to offer a lot of them.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
The Book Inn was run and owned by Kyle Hollingshead, known perhaps to Western pulp collectors as the author of a handful of ACE paperbacks back in the day. I never knew that until writing this essay and searching online to see if The Book Inn was still open. I doubted it since when I was going there regularly in the very early 2000s, Mr. Hollingshead was talking about retiring. It closed a few years ago.
The Book Inn was nice and as the name implies, homier, despite being located in one of Lubbock’s ubiquitous, soulless commercial strips. Inside, the shelves were double-stacked in every section, often with books stacked on top in each shelf as well. Books were piled on the floor, in the window, and on about any flat surface. It’s one of the “fullest” bookshops I’ve ever seen. Once you got into it, you walked delicately. “You’ll never know what you’ll find,” he’d say with genuine wonder in his voice.
It was almost always completely silent inside The Book Inn, minus the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the sound of traffic outside. The windows rattled when semi-trucks trundled down the street.
Of the general used book shops in Lubbock in the early 2000s, The Book Inn had the most serious theology-religion section, just inside the front door. Of course, Lubbock, Texas, is very Evangelical Christian. However, it was not a religious bookshop, nor did the owner come off as particularly religious. I think those were the books to be found, and those were the books to be sold. If he was religious, he never made me feel weird about it, which was nice. Lubbock is a hyper-evangelical community, so the general vibe can be off-putting.
Hollingshead could be a little more prickly than some of the other owners, but once he warmed to you, he was very nice. It wasn’t too long until I confessed I was selling some of the books I bought there online. He started to give me the “trade” discount booksellers give to one another. He would refer to me as a book scout or “runner,” which I wore as a badge of honor. He had noticed I came pretty regularly and there seemed to be no real pattern to what I bought, so instead of playing coy, I admitted what I was doing: taking things he had underpriced and selling them online for a profit. I didn’t phrase it that way, exactly, but that was what I was largely doing, once I’d found things I could afford to add to my own collection. It was very generous of him.
I occasionally bring him bags of books from scouting endeavors where I had to buy a giant lot of books to get the handful I wanted to sell online. It just wasn’t worth the effort, or storage space for things that would sell online for under $10, but it was great inventory for him. He liked that I brought him good stuff to sell, helping me learn what I was already experiencing as an online seller at the time: it wasn’t hard to sell books; it was much harder to buy good books that sell with enough room in your costs to make a buck. His clientele was all in person, in his shop, and all of mine were online, so I guess he figured we weren’t really competing with one another.
He kept an index card file for customers, I think to track stuff they were looking for, but mostly for those of us who brought in books and got in-store credit. That’s always what I did. He’d sometimes offer cash, usually about half of what he’d offer in credit. I think I had to take him up on it a few times, but not often. He’d let you use credit for up to half the purchase price, so there was usually something I could find to make it worth my while, but after the first few months, it was tough. He certainly knew his books, though he’d often say, “You can’t know everything.”
He tried selling online but only out of dire necessity. He hated it. I remember him saying that the brick-and-mortar rare book business was dying because of internet sales. How could he compete with booksellers with even lower overhead than he had, owning the building his shop was in and living a semi-retired life? This seemed to be the big lesson as a general used bookseller through the end of the mail-order era, and the beginning of online selling: hard-to-find books were no longer hard to find, and rare books weren’t that rare after all.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
“Punch, Judy and their Child” by George Cruikshank, 1832 [public domain]
Only a few blocks down from Hester Books was Book Alley. The guy that ran this shop was an odd duck. If you frequent the places old books are heaped together and sold, you encounter some weirdos along the way, so it’s unsurprising. I don’t know how else to describe him. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, except to promote his Punch and Judy puppet shows for children’s parties. He seemed to have almost no interest at all in books, though to his credit, the shop was always very tidy. A single sheet poster at the front of the otherwise nicely appointed shop advertised his availability for puppet shows. A sickly sweet, off-putting smell often lingered in the shop. I think I eventually attributed the odor to a neighboring business in the commercial strip where this shop was located, but it could be powerful. The posted hours of business were also unreliable, perhaps due to his puppet show commitments. I never learned his name.
What I gathered second and third-hand was his father established the shop many years earlier and had a connection to Texas Tech University there in Lubbock. So many private libraries from retiring or dead professors came to the shop over the years. When he died, the shop passed to the son. The impressive books were in beautiful condition usually, and priced accordingly. I was also haunting the place to find severely underpriced books. No one can know everything, and many booksellers were still reluctant to sell online. A sharp-eyed booklover with a little extra time could still visit bookshops and find things to resell elsewhere and make a tidy profit. However, those days were dwindling.
I did find a signed first of Among the Gently Mad there, which felt like a find, though it was still a rather new book. Of course, I wanted it for myself. It was priced too high for me, and when I later came back with the money, of course, it was gone. That’s how that always goes.
There were some nice collectible paperbacks here. The vintage Penguins and related early paperback books were incredible. I remember being shocked to see that some Penguins were issued with dustjackets. It was the first place I saw Armed Services Editions. There was an enormous collection, perhaps complete, of the books of the food writer M.F.K. Fisher. Now that I live very close to her final home, I think back on that collection. I wonder what happened to it.
There was also a wonderful shelf with pictorial publisher cloth bindings from around the turn of the 20th Century, with all kinds of amazing motifs present: Moose and lumberjacks in checked jackets, armored knights and castles, and flags galore. It made for a beautiful display. He also had some very nice bins of ephemera to browse. I recall seeing a lot of sheet music, but there was a lot more, though now I don’t remember what. I remember specifically going there in search of WWII-related ephemera to scan and use as filler in museum exhibitions, but not finding much to work with. Most of it was too old. And all of it was nice. I don’t remember anything more specific in the ephemera, except for some fruit crate labels. The ephemera stock did seem to freshen up periodically, so he must have restocked it, and I always held out hope of finding something cool.
The shop has long since closed, I understand.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Friday, July 22 — 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM in Room 24ABC Celebrating 100 Years of Charles Schulz Moderator Damian Holbrook (TV Guide) and panelists Robb Armstrong (JumpStart), Benjamin L. Clark (curator, Charles M. Schulz Museum), Melissa Menta (Peanuts Worldwide), Alexis J. Fajardo (Schulz Creative Associates), and Hailey Cartwright and Promise Robinson (Armstrong Project scholarship recipients) discuss the centennial and legacy of the Peanuts creator; the publication of a new book Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects; and Peanuts’ inspiring Armstrong Project (named for Franklin Armstrong, Peanuts’ first Black character): two $100,000 endowments to Howard and Hampton Universities to support the work of up-and-coming Black animators.
Saturday, July 23 —4:30 PM – 5:30 PM in Room 26AB It’s a Filmstrip, Charlie Brown In the 1980s, kids got career advice from Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and pals (including a new Latina friend) in educational filmstrips produced by the Peanuts animation team. Benjamin L. Clark (curator, Charles M. Schulz Museum) and Nat Gertler (The Aaugh Blog) discuss and present some of these filmstrips, with one live-cast voice performance by cartoonist Gladys Ochoa (Ribbons of Thought), Allison Gertler (Invisible Zeppelin), and more., and more.
