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.

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