I was wading through eBay listings when I saw a Peanuts board book that I did not recognize- Snow Day! The price was a fair bit higher than I would expect for an 8-page board book, but I did my diligence – it wasn’t available through Amazon, nor through a couple of other sites I checked, so I went ahead and coughed up the money anyway.

And only after I hit the Pay button did I realize that I’d forgotten a key part of my usual diligence: check eBay! And instantly, I came across several cheaper listings for the same dang thing. I was kicking myself when I noticed something: one of those listings had a different cover from what I just ordered. And it only cost a couple of bucks. So I went instantly from feeling that I had already paid too much to paying more just to have this second copy of the same book.

The differences are more than just the cover images (although the back covers differ as well.) The version with the livelier cover is half an inch shorter, a mere 8 inches instead of 8.5. It is also pre-priced at $1 on the back cover, so my immediate though was “oh, they took something they’d already released and came out with a cheaper version for Dollar General and such.”

But I had that backwards, it seems. The shorter version has a 2018 copyright date. The taller version… has no copyright information at all! (Attn: Peanuts Worldwide – Product lacking copyright notice!) But they both appear to have printing dates encoded on them, with the smaller one being printed 6/18 and the larger one a year later.

The interiors are the same – five spreads of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Rerun playing in the snow. This is one of the rare books were Rerun is the primary cover character (although I did just stumble across an Italian one from 1985.)

These are published by Brendon, Inc., who publish a lot of licensed items.

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