Collectible cards

Penguin Workship has announced the Happiness Is a Four-Book Classic Box Set, an October release which will contain their reprints of I Need All the Friends I Can Get, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Security Is a Thumb and a Blanket, and Love Is Walking Hand in Hand, all for the same list price as those four $9.99 books combined. But the set also comes with four “collectible cards”. Now, the word “collectible” is something that one can lay on products that, if anything, makes them less collectible. The truly rare things in the long term are items that are viewed as disposable, rather than keeping them for the sake of keeping them. And unlike, say, typical trading cards, there is not some effort needed to fill in a set; either you get all four cards that come with this product, or you don’t. There aren’t some additional cards out there, or some other product that only gives you a subset of the cards.

But what might be more valuable is the box part of the box set. Did you know there’s a box shortage at the moment? The supply chain issues you’ve been hearing about have reduced the supply of boxes, and the increase in people relying on Amazon and other shipping-based services during the pandemic has increased the demand for them. I know products whose release has been pushed back for months simply due to the lack of boxes to ship them in.

Now, I doubt that slipcase that makes this a box set will be the rare item that will be worth investing in but who knows? Perhaps in some post-apocalyptic future, that box will be the one survival tool that will allow you to become emperor of the land!

Upcoming releases
Destined to blow up

Puffer Jacket Snoopy is a thing… enough of a thing that I’ll be discussing an item that only barely qualifies for this blog (it comes with a book… a tiny book of stickers.) Amazon is now listing for October release a Desktop Inflatable Puffer Jacket Snoopy. It’s one of the …

Upcoming releases
The Return of What’s Necessary

Coming in April is a reissue of Only What’s Necessary, Chip Kidd’s second book on the art of Peanuts, reissued for the 75th anniversary of the strip. (My review of the original 2015 edition is here.) For those keeping track, this is the third cover for this book. Here are the …

Upcoming releases
Covers to coming things

It’s that time when all the computer systems update and suddenly we’re seeing covers t0o some of the books that are rolling down the road toward us. The big one in this batch is probably Snoopy: The Story of My Life, which is the Cartoon Art Museum’s Andrew Farago ghosting …