Good morning, and welcome to the future! Remember, you only have three more days to make Mayan calendar jokes, and then we can all move on to something else.

The year will not be bereft of new Peanuts books. Of course, there will be two more volumes of The Complete Peanuts, one including all the strips from 1983-1984 and the other (gasp) 1985-1986! And as mentioned before, a collection of the new Peanuts comic book is due in August. That little “seedling” edition of Happiness is a Warm Puppy that was announced for last year seems to have been pushed back to October of this year. And there’ll be the usual string of animation adaptations, activity books, and novelty items.

But will there be any particularly cool books that haven’t been announced yet? Well, there’s something I Can’t Talk About Yet that makes me say “yes”, and I bet there’s other things that I don’t know about at all that will also qualify. And as always, there’s the fervent hope that someone will finally do a book edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas! (I’ll bet dollars to donuts that this year, at the very least we will get a mass market record-a-book version, to follow up on this year’s Hallmark exclusive. Of course, that dollar-to-donut ratio is not nearly as impressive as it was in the days when people actually used that phrase.)

I shall do what I can to keep the blog from being empty. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Share the news!