The Dirt on Pig-Pen

I first encountered the Peanuts strips around age six, when my father started taking me with him to the used bookstore. This was the eighties, so the used books were from the sixties and seventies. I naturally gravitated to the pocket paperbacks: small, densely printed volumes with titles like Games People Play, The Art of Loving, and When Bad Things Happen to Good People that projected an air of containing real solutions to the real problems that a real person might have, without being actually readable.