Sometimes, I miss one. Somehow, The Peanuts Poster Collection came out in August without me noticing. But I’m glad that I picked up on the error. This book is a collection of 20 Peanuts posters, and we’ve seen things like this before… but this one is selected by Chip Kidd. If you’ve seen either of his two books of Peanuts, you’d know that Kidd likes his Peanuts not as isolated line work, the ideal printed form of the image, but something that has texture. He likes original art, with all its paper and its markups. He likes product shots. He likes things where Peanuts looks a but different than its default forms. So we get a poster of the jacket to one of the Peanuts View-Master reels. There’s an oddly-colored image from a coloring book cover. There’s a painted-on-canvas Snoopy head. These images have life.

But if you get a book of posters, you likely feel the need for some certain type of poster. So does it have the sort of posters you’re most likely to need? Let’s see:

• Does it have a Christmas image? Yes, taken from a Newsweek cover.
• Does it have a good cartoon for your doctor’s office wall? Yup, a single-panel that Schulz drew for the family physician.
• Does it have one for a lawyer’s office?? Does Snoopy sitting on the giant word TRUTH serve you?
• Does it have the football gag? Yup!
• Does it have the “What a beautiful gory layout!” panel? You bet it does!

Is it perfect? Well, it has the art for the front cover of More Peanuts, and that’s bugging me because More Peanuts was a wrap-around cover, and the part that made it funny was on the back. Y’see, the front was just a shot of Lucy and Charlie Brown walking along, pulling toys on strings.

It was only on the back that we  see what Lucy’s pulling

Now, would this have made an unbalanced poster image on the whole? Probably. (It’d actually work quite nicely as the base for some sort of promotional poster, where you can dump the text into the empty space of the back cover.) But whenever I see the front cover image divorced from the back, I think that a big opportunity has been missed.

But that’s a quibble. All in all, I think that this book does quite a fine job of what it sets out to do, and if you need either a bunch of 11.25″ by 14″ posters or a tall book with a few well-chosen Peanuts images, I recommend this. (I will note that this is a stiff book on stiff paper, which is good, but don’t expect to roll it up to fit in someone’s stocking.)

Purchasing link: The Peanuts Poster Collection

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