I see a lot of Peanuts book covers, but it wasn’t until I was looking over my own recent blog posts that I noticed something about Everything I Need To Know I Learned From Peanuts (coming out next March) and My Life with Charlie Brown (coming out the month after that):

Now let me explain that Peanuts licensees are given access to a huge body of “clip art”, existing individual Peanuts images, and if they wish to go beyond that there are well over 50,000 existing Peanuts comic strip panels to choose from… and yet these two designers (we can presume it was two different designers, it is two different publishers), working on two adjacent-in-release Peanuts books, happened to choose the same image. Colored differently, of course, but same picture.

I hope one of these publishers reconsiders their design before the books’ release (we have seen that happen before). Yes, one generally wants a Peanuts book cover to have some sense of familiarity, invoking the beloved strip… but you don’t want something so familiar that you think you already bought that book last month!

I’ll have the answer on our Sniffy the Pup question (and announce a winner for the contest) tomorrow. Meantime, if you’re doing some shopping and want to be able to get a lot of books cheap, let me steer you toward BookCloseOuts. They sell remaindered books (excess copies the publisher couldn’t sell, generally with a little remainder mark on the bottom edge of the pages) for usually a fraction of the original cover price… and for the next couple days they’re offering half off their already-discounted price on fiction books and free shipping. There are bargains to be had, for yourself and for gifts!

NOTE: I did not design the graphic. I’m not to blame that it says “10,000’s of thousands of books”. I do get a cut out of the sales if you follow that link, so if you want to buy 10,000’s of thousands of books, go ahead!

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