I just picked up the second volume in The Complete Peanuts and was struck by the very interesting, to me, endnote about the sources for the strips. Neither Schulz nor the syndicate archived them; newspaper archives are rarely good sources. In contrast, in the internet world of today, material is simultaneously both ephemeral and permanent. It is instructive to imagine the analogies between the work an archivist must do today to assemble a collection and the work an archivist must do to assemble a collection from only a half-century ago, and to extrapolate to the ever more complex and uncertain work of archivists working to reconstruct the material of centuries past.
I close with an example of the Peanuts team's efforts:
Finally, one strip has proved at least partly "lost": the May 3, 1953 Sunday page. We have found only two copies of it, neither of which includes the top tier (the title panel and panel following it). The version reproduced in this volume is a composite of a trimmed but relatively clean copy from the Chicago Tribune extensively retouched and re-inked to incorporate material visible in a very blurry but more complete microfilm copy; the top tier has been created from scratch by the book's designer, Seth.
Posted by Greg at November 12, 2004 4:13 PM