I was catching up on Jeannie Schulz’s blog, and I came on this entry, where she’s chronicling the Schulz Museum’s updated display of Peanuts books from around the world. I’ve not seen the new display yet, but in Jeannie’s photo, I see the book pictured here. There’s a shot of the plaque for this, which says that the title translates to The Tiny Christmas Book (Julebok = Yule Book, unsurprisingly), without noting that Knøttene is what they call the Peanuts strip in Norway.

Now, that cover image – that’s an A Charlie Brown Christmas promo image that was used as the cover for the early US books adapting the special. So I look it up on the website for Norway’s national library, and I find that it is indeed an adaptation of the TV special! But all the used book sources are failing me for this. While I can find a page which has a clearer picture of the cover, no one has one for sale! So there’s only one copy in the world that I can actually locate. And if I waltzed into the museum and ripped this off the wall to take it and give it a good home among its brethren in my collection, alarms would go off and the police would be called and I’d end up doing time and do you know how hard it is to get respect from the other fellas on your cell block when you’re in the slammer for Peanuts books? I mean, I could end up in Pleasant Valley – and yes, that’s the name of a genuine California penitentiary, the Pleasant Valley State Prison, and it’s hard enough trying to convince people that you’re a tough criminal when you’re doing your maximum security time in Pleasant Valley – and people would be there for taking food to feed their family or taking diamond to feed their crippling drug addiction, and trying to get people to understand that I wasn’t actually stealing the book, I just needed to fill a hole in my collection of book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas… well, I’d be viewed even by the reprobates as a reprobate.  

Still, it might be worth it…

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