The big thick 60th anniversary book Celebrating Peanuts is out, and I gotta say that if you gotta have just one Peanuts book, this is a pretty good choice. (Then again, if you gotta have just one Peanuts book, this is an odd blog for you to be reading. But if you’re buying a book for someone else who needs to have a single Peanuts book in their life, this is a good, if expensive, choice.)

It’s a big book, not exactly something you’ll port around easily. 534 pages, each about 10″ x 12.5″, hardover, and in a nicely thick case. Opening it up, the smell of ink was heavy.

The book is broken up into sections by decade, each assistant-edited by a different person. The strips are reproduced large, with plenty of space between them – only four to five dailies per page, or a Sunday taking the place of two dailies. All of the dailies are run in black-and-white, with most of the Sundays in color. I haven’t reviewed every page and every choice, but generally speaking, the folks behind this seem to have done a good job of choosing strips, picking things that are not only good strips, but also well represent the period of the strip they’re taken from. Each decade starts with a one-page overview covering what made that decade in Peanuts special. Quotes from Schulz (culled from a variety of interviews, many of which you may have seen quoted elsewhere) are peppered through the book.

The design seems meant to make it look like not a cheap book, with only a small margin of white around the strips, which are given a thin drop-shadow against a beige background. I’m not sure that’s optimal for readability, it seems to distract the eye. More distracting, perhaps, is the decision to go with a somewhat glossy paper. While that serves the color Sundays well, I’ve generally found gloss to be a bad idea for black-and-white strips, making them harder to look at than the flat, dull newspaper stock that strips were designed for. And a book this big (Amazon lists the weight at about 8 pounds, but I’m not sure it isn’t heavier) can be harder to get at just the right angle so that the local lighting doesn’t shine badly on the page. But these are, I suppose, the nitpicks of someone who occasionally has to put these books together (and won’t claim to do a great job, mind you.)

As I said, this is an expensive book – list price of $75. At the moment, Amazon has it at a steep discount, bringing the price down to a mere $40.50, but I’m not sure how long that will last.

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