Here’s a book that came out last year but I didn’t notice, because it’s not available through the usual sources: Peanuts Collectible Ornaments. It is (apparently, as I don’t actually have a copy yet) a picture-laden guide to all those odd objects that suddenly seem to clog the trees when December rolls around. You can order it from the author’s website.

But sight unseen, I’ll give the book respect on one aspect: it’s not a price guide. There’s a lot of pressure out there to produce price guides, to get people to buy the book because it will show them which objects are going to make them money…. when the truth of the collectibles field is that it’s one thing to turn money into objects, and it’s a different thing to turn objects into a fraction of that money. In my experience, price guides do a far lesser job in reflecting what items sell for and do more to set what those items sell for. I’ve been approached in the past to write a Peanuts book price guide, and decided that’s not something which I would do.

Although from time to time I do consider doing a Peanuts book collector guide, a deeper (and more photo-filled) version of the online guide, perhaps an online-orders-only print-on-demand item that you could carry with you as a checklist wherever you go hunting for Peanuts books. But as many of us Peanuts fans there are out there, I’m not sure there’s enough of us gotta-get-em-all crazies to make the book worthwhile. It’s somewhere on my list of “things to do” (a list which is far longer than my list of “times available to do things”, alas.)

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