It doesn’t seem likely, but this year there are actually more new books of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown than of the perennial book-generator, A Charlie Brown Christmas!

The latest edition to be added to the list is the Play-a-Sound edition published by Publications International. This is a board book with six sound buttons… and as such things go, it’s pretty good. (My two year old was eager to get his hands on it and quite happy when he did.) The story gets told across 10 pages, with lots of cues for the reader to press one of the six buttons… which include Snoopy’s laugh and Charlie Brown saying “Good grief!” and “I got a rock”, exactly what you’d want on such a book. The big button on the upper right of the book is a doorbell, and randomly plays one of three doorbell sounds when pressed. The art comes out of Schulz’s studio, mainly Vicki and Bob Scott who did such a nice job on the Happiness is a Warm Blanket graphic novel (which by the way is now available in paperback). And this is a nice job, too. As for Brian Houlihan’s text, I find it interesting that there is about as much text about the book’s batteries on the inside front cover as there is text telling the story in the book. We get a short paragraph about ordering replacement batteries, and a long one about replacing the batteries, warning about disposing the batteries, telling you that if your child swallows batteries in the USA, then you should take him to the doctor and have the doctor call a certain number… but if they swallow batteries in other countries, the doctor is supposed to call poison control but you are not told to take your child to the doctor. Then there’s a paragraph about discarding batteries in Europe. Then, highlighted by indentation, is this: “Warning: Changes and modifications to this unit not expressly approved by the party responsible for compliance could void the user’s authority to operate the equipment.” That’s possibly the scariest thing I’ve ever seen on a book!

The book is orderable now.

So the score so far for this year:

Great Pumpkin has:

• This book
• Another edition from the same publisher that is not a sound book
• Another sound book, but from a different publisher
• The It’s the GP, CB leaf-globe-with-sixteen-page-sticker-book-that-only-has-eight-stickers.

A CB Christmas has

• The Hallmark recordable book
• The non-recordable sound book

So the lead looks long… but wait! What’s this? I go to Publication International Limited’s website to try to find more information about this book, and they don’t acknowledge that this book exists… but there’s another book that I hadn’t seen yet… and it’s title is A Charlie Brown Christmas! Now this is not an adaptation of the animated special, it’s a sound book/song book, with the five sound buttons playing 10 Christmas songs (if one counts “Linus and Lucy” as a Christmas song, and let’s face it, we do), and with the lyrics inside. At the moment, Amazon doesn’t carry this book directly (you can get it through them from a third-party seller), but Barnes & Noble not only has it in stock, they have it at better than half off at the moment. (They list Lou Weber as the author; Louis Weber is actually the publisher of Publications International, Ltd.)

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