Thanks to alert AAUGH Blog reader Debbie (whose online comic strip “Fluffy & Mervin” you should check out) filling in when my Googlefu was failing me, I now have a copy of the one edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas I was missing: the book and tape edition.

Now this is not some great variation; after all, its just a conversion of 1977’s book and record edition. What that means, though, is that dating this one is tricky. It bears the 1977 copyright date, since it’s riding on the copyright of that earlier version. There are no later dates on the volume itself. So for my best estimate, I dug through the other book-and-record and book-and-tape editions for clues… and the best clue I found was the absence of clues. None of them mentioned the existence of this… which is a clue in itself, because most of the tape editions have listings of all the then-issued tape editions, and none included Christmas. The last of the tape editions listed is You’re the Greatest, Charlie Brown, and that one has a copyright date of 1980, so I’m reckoning that this one can’t have come out before then, and probably not long after that, so I’m estimating it at 1981. (That would mean that Christmas, while the first of the book-and-record editions, would be the last of the book-and-tapes.)

But there may be another reason it was left off of the list. The book-and-record editions have a numbering starting at 401, on the upper right corner. The book-and-tape editions have a total separate numbering system there, from 82DC to 91DC, consecutively. So whoever made up those listings in the other books may have overlooked it in their catalog. (The copy I did buy is in lovely condition, suggesting a certain lack of aging.)

And yes, the copy I bought did come with the cassette. It also came with a second, non-Peanuts book-and-tape book, sans cassette. What a deal!

As always, you can check out the AAUGH.com full guide to the various A Charlie Brown Christmas editions. ‘Cause that’s what we do here.

Share the news!