I just received a couple new Peanuts books, one I’ll talk about later, but for now, I’ve got one that’s making me quite happy: Snoopy: Cowabunga!, the first in the “Amp” series of strip collections aimed at kids. And it really is nicely put together, and priced well for the target. For $9.99, there’s 208 pages of strips (either two dailies, one Sunday, or half a Sunday per page), plus a couple of activities, a couple pages of facts about Peanuts, and a 10.5″x17.5″ Peanuts Who’s Who poster, identifying 60 characters from the strip. There’s a simple flip animation along the edge of the book.

They do a lot of things right, both in terms of feel – it’s on appropriate paper – and editorial choice. While the book is about Snoopy, they don’t make the mistake that some books have made of dropping strips without the title character out of storylines.

This is not a book for the hardcore. You already have these strips anyway, in glorious black and white, in The Complete Peanuts. And unlike this book, there the Sundays will be complete; even when run on two pages, this book uses the short version of the Sundays. And there’s one more thing that will weird the hardc0re folks out a mite: the strips have the dates in them… and the dates are from the years 2000 through 2002. That’s right, they’re running the date that the strips were rerun. Plus, they’re in the book in the order that they were rerun, which means it starts with strips that were originally run in 1974, then strips from 1973, then 1972.

This is a good book to be getting, what with the holidays coming up. That’s right, you should order copies to give out to all your trick-or-treaters.

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