Newly available at your local Hallmark store… well, at least, at the second-most-local Hallmark store around here… is Little Stories, Simple Truths: The Joy of a Peanuts Christmas. This is a collection of Christmas-themed Peanuts dailies, with one-page essays by Molly Wigand introdcing each of five sections. The essays don’t add much to the work; talking about why the strips are smart and insightful ends up feeling more like back cover copy to sell the material than like something that enhances the reading of the book. The strip are, of course, good stuff…. but the subtitle of the book invokes A Joy of a Peanuts Christmas, and earlier Hallmark publication that is one of my favorite strip reprint books.

The book is very designy. There is only one strip on each two-page spread, on the right-hand page; the left-hand page is a not-meant-to-be-read piece made by repeating the strip that’s on the right. This all means that there’s fewer than 60 strips in this 128-page hardcover.

The wide, squat format matches last year’s The Pastor is In, so it seems likely that Hallmark will do more of these books. This one is a mere $9.95 in the US and in Canada.

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