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 may also want the new Hallmark book The Friendship of a Lifetime: Peanuts Through the Years, which serves a very different function on a coffee table: it protects it.

You see, Friendship of a Lifetime is not a book filled with stories, moral, or message. No, it’s a book filled with coasters, there to keep your root beer from leaving rings on your tabletop. It feels like a children’s board book, but the pages are designed to be ripped out to give you 20 squarish-with-rounded-corners coaster, each printed with a Peanuts image in a single color, with a small note on the back of which decade the image is from. Despite the “friendship” title and the picture of Charlie Brown and Snoopy on the cover, the images aren’t all about that relationship, nor are they all about friendship; one, for example, is just Charlie Brown banging his head against a tree.

So who is this for? Well, they could certainly have easy sold a box of coasters, that would be normal. The fact that they made it a book means just one thing: they were targeting my money, my $14.99 (less whatever Hallmark discount I had at the moment.) Presumably, this is the amount that stood between Hallmark staying in business and them falling by the corporate wayside, so who would I be if I held back?

(And hey, as long as I’m posting: when discussing the “puffy jacket” Snoopy image the other day, I should’ve pointed to the original strip for the image, which is from February 20, 1984.)

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