The Peanuts Storybook Treasury slams 18 of the Simon Spotlight storybooks from 2015 through 2021 into a single hardcover volume. In order to get them all into 304 pages, it cheats just a little bit, skipping over the covers and individual copyright pages, and occasionally combining what had been two pages in the original book into one.

The pages are printed actually somewhat larger than the original books (don’t go by the photo; I used a Kohl’s hardcover edition of Shoot for the Moon, Snoopy!, which is larger than the original edition.) However, the art is actually no bigger than it was in the original; they’ve given borders around the images.

Books included are:

• Lose the Blanket, Linus!
• Kick the Football, Charlie Brown!
• Cool Like Snoopy
• Messy Like Pigpen
• Snoopy for President
• Sweet Like Sally
• A Best Friend for Snoopy
• A Best Friend for Woodstock
• It’s Hockey Time, Franklin
• You’re a Big Brother, Charlie Brown!
• Nice to Meet You, Franklin
• Shoot for the Moon, Snoopy!
• Snoopy’s Snow Day
• Woodstock’s Sunny Day
• Woodstock’s First Flight
• It’s Springtime, Snoopy
• The Many Faces of Snoopy
• Hugs for Snoopy

Rather than have credits with each story, they’re all placed on the copyright page… and while I didn’t check every credit, at least one of them is wrong. (2016’s Kick the Football was drawn by Scott Jeralds, rather than the talented-but-deceased Charles M. Schulz guy they credit.)

If you want books like this, this is a good deal. (But I’ll still always hold that a strip collection is a better gift even for the very young. Read comics to your kids, teach them to read comics.)

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