About a year ago, I stumbled across some hardcover books each of which collected three of the Ballantine Books collections, mostly individual year collections from the last few years. And despite having been many places looking at Peanuts books, including back to the same store many times, I never saw those books again.

But today, in a Borders Books, I was looking at their remainders-and-discounts pile, and there I saw this:

This $9.99 paperback holds the contents of two books, It’s a Dog’s Life, Snoopy and It’s a Big World Charlie Brown, and thus it reprints all of the 1998 and 1997 strips… in that order. These are the same strips you can expect to see in The Complete Peanuts volume 24, when that book comes out years from now… only in this book, they’re in color.

To make things tough on those of us who index Peanuts books, there’s the question of what the title of this book is. Judging by that front cover, it’s simply Peanuts. However, that word appears nowhere on the spine of the book, which just lists the names of the two books it reprints. (What also worries an indexer like me about these books is that I just stumbled across them; none of my elves let me know they existed. So are there other such books I’m simply unaware of? AAUGH!)
I tried using my webfu, and there’s no sign that this edition is available on the web, or for that matter even mentioned anywhere online. I doubt it’s a Borders exclusive. It lacks a UPC code, so it’s pretty clearly a book that was published specifically for the bargain racks – you can check out the bargain racks of your local bookstore to see if they have it, if you either don’t have the books it collects or are a crazed completist like me. But if you are checking for it at Borders, here is a 20% off coupon good for the next week.

(Ach, the businessman in me is twinging a little for steering you to go to a store and buy a book I can’t offer you. So I’ll quiet him down by steering you to a good deal on an HD-DVD player for under $200 and you can get 10 free HD-DVDs with it. This isn’t an endorsement on my part — I’ve yet to get into the next-gen DVD wars and have no opinion. But if you want HD-DVD, that seems like a good starter! I presume the deal is good for a limited time, but I’ve no idea what that limit is.)

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