The hardcover strip collection Peanuts for the Soul is published in the UK, but there are copies available in the US (although Amazon is for some reason listing the title as The Comfort of Blankets.) This is an undersized hardcover collecting the more philosophical strips, with each strip (whether a full Sunday or a single panel) run across two pages (well, except for pages 44 and 45, where for some reason they manage to run the same two panels twice. It’s always reassuring ot me to see an error like that coming from another publisher; it lets me beat myself up a little less for the errors I’ve made as a publisher over the years.) The strips are arranged in chapters on “Life”, “Love”, “Family”, “Friendship”, “Back to School”, “At Play”, and “Happiness”. The strips chosen are generally (or perhaps completely, I didn’t check) from the latter half of the Peanuts run.

While there is a focus on strips that make philosophical statements, there’s not an attempt to gather ones that make a specific statement. This isn’t “Peanuts to give you hope!”, nor “Peanuts to cure that good mood” (although as it’s Peanuts, it leans more to the latter than the former.) No crescendo of revelation from reading the strips in the order presented…. which is fine and fair, but it also can be fun when an editor selects strips to build a specific tone.

It has 54 strips in all, and it would make a perfectly acceptable gift but I can’t say to whom; there’s no specific situation where I think “hey, this is the book you need!” But hey, it’s a Peanuts book, and that’s never wrong.

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