Jim didn’t mention that the best book ever has a Joy of Cooking- or Legends of the Jews-quality index.
For example:
Charlie Brown, insults to, general . . . 1, 9, 10, 27, 33, 41, 65, 102, 116, 128, 131, 171
Snoopy, clothes, depicted in, to disturbing effect . . . 163, 171
Snoopy, dog reference, offended by . . . 13, 41, 81, 118, 120, 130, 200, 209, 236, 257
Snoopy, dog reference, nonplussed by . . . 20
Tricycle, Charlie Brown bullied off by Patty . . . 100, 102, 104, 195
Baseball doesn’t get such a specific breakdown, but it is featured on sixteen separate pages.
In the next few months, Stacey and I will be building the shelf that, in mid-2016, will hold all twenty-five volumes.
Original comments…
thatbob: Is it an index to only the first two years’ encompassed in volume 1? Or is it an index to the whole 50+ years, to be printed in all twenty-five volumes? And if it’s just an index to the first two years, I can’t help but wonder whether subsequent volumes will include a cumulative index (hot!!!), or if maybe each volume will be individually indexed (yawn) with cumulative five or ten-year indices (hot!) or a separate full index volume (hottest!!!). This is something you should try to determine before building your shelves.
Levi: I was thinking about that last night. The Legends of the Jews has a separate index volume, which seems to most often be the way that multi-volume scholarly productions go. But I bet this will just be an index to each volume.
However, I _think_ there’s no law that would prohibit us from making and selling a comprehensive index to all the volumes in 2016.
Hilary Spurling (with author Anthony Powell’s encouragement) did that with the twelve volumes of _A Dance to the Music of Time_, tracking each character. It was called _An Invitation to the Dance_. We’d have to call ours _Peanuts Shells_ or something.
Jim: Assuming they don’t change the format of the books at some point, the last volume is going to be 1999-2000…but the last new “Peanuts” strip was in February 2000. Plenty of space for a cumulative index in that one.