In my post the other day showing Schulz biographies reusing the same cover photos, I left out this pair, one an upcoming book, the other from 2001:

But hey, as long as we’re doing Schulz biography covers, let’s take a look at a better-designed one for an upcoming volume:

This young adult biography ships in April, and is priced for private ownership.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a good gift for a driver in your life… look, you’ve heard about GPSes, you know they’re portable real-time maps that can give you directions as you go. You may still not think one would be helpful, or you may think they must be too complicated to use. Let me tell you about my dear dad. He’s in his seventies. He was planning a long car trip to visit various friends and family, including coming to my new house and meeting my new baby a couple months back. In anticipation, and after discussing it with him, we bought him a GPS, a bottom-of-the-line TomTom. He thought he didn’t need it, that he’d never been lost in his life, but seemed willing to experiment… until he got the box, which he stared at and left unopened. He’s a smart guy, but thought himself a bit long in the tooth for figuring out this new piece of tech that he didn’t really need. So he sent it back to us. We kept it, giving away a GPS we liked less to a friend. So Dad starts on his trip, and due to an unexpected health issue, after he comes here and meets young Ben, I have to take over his driving for a couple days (I was headed his way anyway). So I take along the TomTom, turn it on, and he sees how easy it is to use, how helpful it is in warning about upcoming turns, in finding nearby restaurants and gas stations when those things are needed. When his journey is over, he goes out and buys himself the same thing…

Well, not exactly the same thing, he buys the unit with the wider screen. And that’s what the big sale is today: a 4.5″ TomTom GPS for ninety bucks. In terms of saved time, saved gas, and saved stress, our GPS has paid for themselves many times over. (And they’re small and pack away easily, so if you’re flying to another part of the country and renting a car, you’ll find them incredibly useful when you’re in odd territory.)

Also: back at a discount – The Complete Dennis the Menace volume 4 is once again just four bucks and change, marked down from $25. You may not need the complete run of these books, but at this price this one thick volume covering two years of the daily panels is good to have.

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