A pile of Peanuts Collector Club newsletters are cluttering my house. As a collector, I don’t have the heart to just throw them away. The photocopied pages stuck in binders might hold hidden clues to the past, I told myself. What’s a collector to do?
The Work Begins
I bought a scanner. Not just any scanner. An Epson FF-680W. This scanner is perfect for fat stacks of photos and documents. When you have thousands of pages to document, this is what you need. You can buy your own on Amazon.com and help support this site by using my link. You think it’s expensive, but my goodness, if you’ve got a big job to do, this is the tool you need.
And so, the organization began. Each newsletter is scanned twice. Once for a regular photo-type scan to a JPG, one for a black and white Optical Character Recognition (OCR) PDF composite. Digitizing takes just minutes, even with having to pass the pages through twice for each type. Now it’s easy to scroll through the newsletters and magnify for additional details. So good!
The Pay-off Begins
I figured it would take some time for this project to pay some dividends. However, as I was checking through the scans, what should I see? Snoopy wearing a library t-shirt in the Peanuts Collector Newsletter Vol 1 from 1994. Within the last year I had acquired one of these library-loving Snoopy dolls and was wondering what his origin story was and if he was meant to be wearing that tee. Here was confirmation direct from librarian Cheryl Foote. With this information, I was able to gage a year of its release and hunt down another piece of confirming info in just minutes thanks to the OCR pdf. This time it was the 1987 January-February Issue of the same newsletter in “POSTER LIST by BARBARA BALSER“. She writes up the exact description and info on the “Read” poster that Cheryl had shared. Mystery Solved!
It just gets better! In that same 1987 issue I spotted a Boy Scout pin I had just purchased. I don’t need a magnifying glass to solve these mysteries when they just pop out of the woodwork!
The Data
While I’d love to make these scans public, I don’t own the copyright to either the text or the photos. The two pages I am sharing are for educational purposes.
Since 1983, the Peanuts Collector Club newsletter has featured articles and personal photos from many Peanuts fans. If you’d like to give me permission to reprint one of your articles, I’d love to share it. Also to consider are the names, phone numbers and addresses of the Club’s members that I wouldn’t want to share without permission.
More Mysteries to Solve
If releasing them isn’t an option, what’s the next step? Support CollectPeanuts.com! The more generous my fellow Peanuts fans are, the more time I can dedicate to research, videos, cleaning, repairing, sharing and so much more. Putting together all the pieces of this puzzle we call Peanuts memorabilia takes time and a really good memory. The more information I can take in, the more we’ll learn about the history of Peanuts.
I am missing some volumes of the newsletter. If you have any you can donate to this digitizing project, please reach out. When I’m done with them, I just pass them on to another collector to enjoy.
A big thank you to my Patreon supporters! Without their monthly support, I would not be able to justify such a time and labor saving device. As Snoopy says, “I love a happy ending!”
