I put the “facts” in “factsimile”!

Upcoming releases

Titan Books has announced an April release for a facsimile edition of 1965’s Sunday’s Fun Day, Charlie Brown. It’s described as “The 11th Facsimile edition of the original 1960 classic Peanuts paperbacks first published in 1965 featuring 126 Sunday Peanuts newspaper strips from 1962-1965.” I have a couple of things to say about that.

The first is that while they are reprinting a 1965 book, they’re not reprinting a 1965 edition. The solicited cover is not the original yellow cover design, which you should see here (although even that image is not a first printing, but a fifth printing from 1967.) The white-edged cover format was introduced to the line later; I don’t have a full list of the various printings of Sunday’s Fun Day, but it probably switched over around 1970. And you know what? I think it’s fine they’re using that later printing, a good idea actually. Part of the sales of these are as nostalgia items, I reckon, and they already have ten books in this series out for those who are nostalgic for the original covers. To a lot of people, the white-cover versions would’ve been their first Peanuts books (particularly since hardcover editions of this design were available through the Weekly Reader book order forms in school), and we might as well feed that group’s nostalgia as well.

The other note is that their descriptor is a little bit off, although less than 2%. Assuming this is an accurate facsimile, it will have 124 Sunday strips, not 126. It’s a 128 page book, one Sunday per page, but with four pages of front matter. But it’s still a nice book for $6.99 (which is less than it cost in 1965, allowing for inflation.) This should make a nice stocking stuffer… for anyone who puts out their stockings in April!

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