Chip Kidd on PEANUTS: THE ART OF CHARLES SCHULZ

"Goodbyes always make my throat hurt . . . I need more hellos . . ."
--Charlie Brown, 1967

In July of 2000, at the invitation of the executors of Charles Schulz's estate, the photographer Geoff Spear and I were granted unlimited access to the Peanuts archive and the collections of the Schulz family in Santa Rosa, California, where we photographed for two weeks. Shortly thereafter, the cartoonist Chris Ware lent me his extensive collection of vintage Peanuts strips, many of them dating from the first three years of its existence, 1950-1953.

PEANUTS: THE ART OF CHARLES SCHULZ is the result, and it attempts to present the work of Charles M. Schulz in the way I felt it should be seen. And, to be honest, it's also a way I can avoid saying goodbye to it. To them.

For all of us who ate our school lunches alone and didn't have any hope of sitting anywhere near the little red-haired girl and never got any valentines and struck out every single time we were shoved to the plate for Little League, we had Peanuts and Charlie Brown to take the sting out of it. I find when you look closer than you're supposed to at something you think you're familiar with, you're introduced to it all over again.

And you say hello.

--Chip Kidd

Mr. Kidd is a graphic designer and writer living in New York City. His book jacket designs for Alfred A. Knopf (where he has worked for over thirteen years) have helped spawn a revolution in the art of American book packaging. His work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Eye, Print (cover story), Entertainment Weekly, The New Republic, Time, The New York Times, Graphis, New York, and ID magazines. The latter chose him as part of its first ID 40 group of the nation's top designers and has awarded him "Best of Category, Packaging" twice. In 1997 he received the International Center of Photography's award for Use of Photography in Graphic Design, and he is a regular contributor of visual commentary to the Op-ed page of the New York Times. He has been the design consultant for The Paris Review since 1995, and in 1998 he was made a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.

His designs have been describde as "Monstrously ugly" (John Updike), "apparently obvious" (William Boyd), "Faithful flat-earth rendering" (Don DeLillo), "surprisingly elegant" (A. S. Mehta), "a distinguished parochial comic balding Episcopal priest" (Allan Gurganus), "Two colors plus a sash" (Martin Amis) and "not a piece of hype. My book was lucky." (Robert Hughes).

Mr. Kidd has also written about graphic design and popular culture for Vogue, The New York Observer, Entertainment Weekly, Details, 2WICE, The New York Post, ID and Print. His first book, Batman Collected (Bulfinch, 1996), was awarded the Design Distinction award from ID magazine. He is the co-author and designer of the two-time Eisner award-winning Batman Animated (HarperCollins, Fall 1998). As an editor, Kidd has overseen the publication of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and Dan Clowes's David Boring at Pantheon Books, and Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz.

The Cheese Monkeys, his first novel, will be published by Scribner in Fall 2001.