A Charlie Brown Book Review

On December 9, 1965,our family was one of many who watched the first Peanuts TV special.

A few weeks later, I received five bucks from one pair of grandparents for Christmas.  That was a LOT of money for a nine-year-old in 1965!  That's about $50 bucks today.

When we drove to Tulsa (fifty miles away) in the week between Christmas and New Year's, one of the places we stopped was Louis Meyer's Bookstore.

And using my Christmas money, I bought a copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas, seen here and below in pix taken yesterday with my phone.  That rip you see in the jacket is all the way up and down; the jacket is in two main pieces.

Above are the book flaps.  Note the papers tucked behind the rear flap.

This is written in the front endpaper. I think it's my dad's printing.

Here is Mom's handwriting.  The book is "from" Grandpa and Grandma Whitley," but as I said, I bought the book with money they gave me.

When I bought the book, I remember Mr Meyer bending down and saying to Mom and Dad, "What a polite young man."  Boy, he didn't know me very well (as Bugs Bunny might say)!

What an honor to buy a book from the man I'd seen on TV!

I was in the fourth grade in December 1965.  Below is the book report I found tucked into the endpapers when I took the other pix.

That cursive's pretty good for a fourth grader!  PS I understand why I only got an "OK" on this.  Most of its length is verbatim quotations from the book.  And the concluding paragraph is kind of impersonal.  Still, the actual structure is not bad at creating an in medias res for Charlie Brown's moral crisis.

By the way ... MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

  

See you Monday.

    

Sing It Again, Bilbo!

One of the important parts of being a teen and having your own room is decorating its walls with posters.  Of course, Mom or Dad might think your were defacing, not decorating.

One of the many posters I bought and hung up, with no parental conflict at all, was one containing "Bilbo's Last Song."

Here is the text:

Bilbo's Last Song
(At the Grey Havens)

Day is ended, dim my eyes,
but journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship's beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the Sea.

Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
the wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
beneath the ever-bending sky,
but islands lie behind the Sun
that I shall raise ere all is done;
lands there are to west of West,
where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

Guided by the Lonely Star,
beyond the utmost harbour-bar
I'll find the havens fair and free,
and beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship, my ship! I seek the West,
and fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-Earth at last.
I see the Star above your mast!

You can read about it here, too.

Below is a Pauline Baynes poster of the poem.

Now, I do not have the poster any more.  But, the little sticker from the shrinkwrap?  THAT I have!

From this extreme enlargement of a sticker that's about three inches high, you can tell that the sylvan image is not the same as on the Baynes poster.

Here's an image of the same poster I had, for sale online.

I wonder why there were two posters of this very strictly copyrighted poem?

Au revoir until Thursday, Christmas!