Nat should be talking about A Charlie Brown Groundhog Day by now…

No, this is the 1965 edition. Really!
No, this is the 1965 edition. Really!

Yes, yes, I’m writing about book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas again. It’s a mania, I tell ya, a mania!

Today, the mail brought a first printing of the original book adaptation. Now, I know what you’re thinking — didn’t I already have a first printing? In fact, lots of you are probably thinking that you have the first printing as well. And I’ve come to believe that you’re wrong!

Through talking to folks, I’d found that a few… a very few… had copies of the World Press adaptation with dust jackets. Now that wouldn’t be telling in itself. But all of these dust jacket editions were a different size from the more common hardcover edition. Both editions are 9 inches wide, but whereas most copies are 7.5 inches tall, the dust jacketed one is about an inch taller. (And just to keep things confusing, there are later copies that height done for a boxed set, but those have no dust jacket.)

Now, it’s not likely that both editions were issued in 1965. After all, nobody thought that the Christmas special was going to be as big as it became; it hardly seems the time for a multi-format push. So why do I think that the taller edition came first? Here are my clues:

  • The cover art fits better on the larger edition. The smaller edition has a rather large gutter of black on the right side. This suggests that the design was built around the larger edition, and was somewhat clumsily adapted to the smaller one.
  • The smaller copies I find mention on the copyright page that this was a Parents’ Magazine’s Read Aloud and Easy  Reading Program Selection. The larger one does not, suggesting that it was published before that selection was made.
  • The clincher for me is finding this copy of the book for sale. It has a dust jacket… and they say it’s a reviewer’s copy. Likely, that means it’s either stamped as a review copy or they have the cover sheet that was sent out with the review copy (and I’m not going to spend the $1150 they’re asking for the copy to find out which!) And review copies are something one sends out when a book is first published.

So when was the squatter version published? I’m guessing that they blew through the real first printing in the first year, when the special proved so popular, and then switched to the short one. And despite the “first printing” listing in every copy of that edition, it’s clear that they aren’t all first printings. There are are variances in the shorter version: some have an asterisk above the Printed in the United States of America line, some do not.

For the curious: the larger version had a cover price of $2.50.  The jacket flaps have images from the adaptation and an explanation of the full plot; really, one could argue that the flaps are themselves yet another adaptation of the special.

And then they finish up with this paragraph:

THE AUTHOR: Charles M. Schulz is the best-selling author of PEANUTS and many other books. His cartoons and daily comic strips are syndicated in more than five hundred newspapers all over the world.

Doesn’t that look perfectly like it was written by someone who needed to fill out two sentences and didn’t have two sentences worth of knowledge? While all technically correct (Schulz was a best-selling, author, he did author a book entitled Peanuts, but that book wasn’t a best-seller and the books that were best-sellers were “Peanuts” books; he did have some cartoons syndicated which weren’t daily comic strips – the “Young Pillars” material was syndicated to some church papers), it doesn’t read like something one would write unless one was desparate to reach 33 words.

Oh, I’m picky.

This may be the last of these posts for a while. There’s not a lot of A Charlie Brown Christmas editions out there that I know of but don’t have. Still, we shall see if Santa Beagle brings us a new one this year. Meanwhile, if you don’t have your editions of A Charlie Brown Christmas memorized, you can always check out the guide!

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