Peanuts in letterbox format

New releases

Yesterday, my postal carrier brought to me my big pile of the new Peanuts stamps, as well as the book that I’d ordered. Now, a Peanuts book being published by the United States Postal Service may sound like an inherently strange thing; other arms of the US government have issued Peanuts publications before. But the degree to which this is both fully a Peanuts thing and fully a Post Office thing is fun. The heart of this book is 38 pages of Peanuts strips all about postal themes — correspondence, mailboxes, and stamps. They’re run in order, with either 2 or 3 dailies or one Sunday on each page. All the strips are in black and white, although the book does use color printing for other purposes.

But it’s not just the strips that are postal. The book’s brief biography of Schulz and its history of the strip are postal-focused… a technique that works better than you’d think. This was, after all, a man who learned drawing from a correspondence school, and a strip that became integrated because a former schoolteacher wrote a letter suggesting it. The material in the back is all about Peanuts stamps, not just this new centennial releases but the two earlier US Peanuts stamp releases.

The package is kind of nice, with a well-designed embossed cover (with a flap to reveal an extra image). $23.95 is a bit stiff for a short paperback like this, but the price is more that of a collectible… and it does come with a “first day of issue” stamp. As of this writing, the book is still available to order from the Postal service.

Share the news!
Animated Peanuts
Officially, it’s a “Super Chubby”

When I reviewed the 2015 book adapting the TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, I had this to say: The book that’s titled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (adaptation by Kara McMahon, art by Scott Jeralds) takes basically the whole special and simplifies everything. It briefly tells you that Charlie …

New releases
Review: Letters to Snoopy

Ah, I’m behind in reviewing some things, but I need to clean up my living room of book clutter in preparation for an upcoming oarty… and if I want to remove a Peanuts books from the room and put it up in the AAUGH,com Reference Library, I have to review …

New releases
A different kind of coffee table book

If you have a coffee table, you should have a “coffee table book”, a large, heavily illustrated color volume that your guests can easily and casually flip through, (Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects is a good choice, of course.) But you …