Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Peanuts is a recently-released hardcover gift book. The format is pretty straightforward; on the left hand of most spreads is a topic one might need to learn about, and on the right hand is a Peanuts strip in which a characters demonstrates such knowledge or gains such knowledge for himself. For example, the left side of the page might say “How to offend a serious musician…” and the strip on the right will have Lucy opining to Schroeder that Beethoven “probably thought he was too good to play Jingle Bells.” There are a handful of Sunday strips in here, although the book is a bit small to present them well; most of the strips are dailies, all taken from the last third of Schulz’s run. The dailies are neither in black and white nor in full color, but are in very selective color – in most of the strips, just one object is colored, a single color. That’s actually a good choice, although the quality of the effect varies. It’s a reasonably-well put together attempt at what it was attempting to be, but what it is is a gift item or novelty; there are too few strips presented too small for it to be a serious strip collection (not that it has any pretense in that direction.)

The title and concept are obviously a reference to the hit book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten… which is a sign of how things change. It used to be that gift books were inspired by Peanuts books, rather than the other way around, as anyone who has a copy of Happiness is a Rat Fink or Johnny Carson’s Happiness is a Dry Martini can attest.

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