Here Comes Charlie Brown!: A Peanuts Pop-up, Gene Kannenberg, Jr.’s adaptation of the very first Peanuts strip, is not the first Peanuts book to reprint only a single strip. There was at least one board book that did much the same thing. However, that board book was, at heart, a book, using a full Sunday strip to tell a story aimed at a very young audience, something that could be read as well as stuck into one’s mouth.

This pop-up book is really more an “art object” than it is a book. Its story is not enough for a child, its pop-ups are not mechanically fascinating. But if you want to consider the very first Peanuts strip carefully, this gives you another way of looking at it. Each of the four panels is given usually-slight layered three-dimensionality, as well as color (which the original strip didn’t have, of course, but there is an attempt to give the visible-dot system of color that Peanuts was originally colored in.) The whole package is carefully made, with a hard cover that not only encloses the book in the usual means, but with an extended flap on the back that folds over to cover the right edge and put a second layer on the front.

Is this worth buying at $16.99? Well, not if you’re buying it as a “read”, no, not with just four panels then two pages of text explaining the work. Is it worth it as an art object? That’s the trick with art objects, it depends what they mean to you. it’s an interesting thing to own, certainly.

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