The warning signs about the new book Rediscovering the True Meaning of Christmas with A Charlie Brown Christmas”: Celebrating Christmas with a Charlie Brown Touch starts with the title, and its curious use of a single double-quotation mark. That’s part of the name every time it’s listed, whether on the Amazon listing title, the cover, or this title page,:

The large gap between Charlie and Brown. The partial capitalizing of the author name. The horror, the utter horror…

The book has 53 pages, and while I’ve only looked at the preview that ends in page 8, It’s got all the feel of someone realizing they had a 53 page book due in an hour. A large font and huge margins keep it down to about 150 words per page. Four pages of table of contents, starting with “Chapter 1: Introductions”… which is not actually the title of chapter 1, it is merely “Introduction” singular…. but it’s still called a chapter even though (and I’m speaking as a publisher of over a quarter century) and Introduction is generally not considered a chapter. It’s a thing unto itself, that comes before the chapters. There’s only a couple pages of the text body of the book in the Amazon previews, but a fair portion of those two pages come to promising you that the book will explain to you the “many facets” of the TV special’s legacy.

Well, judging by the table of contents, there’s not that much legacy of the special itself. Instead, we are promised such chapter subtopics as “Collecting Peanuts Memorabilia”, “Peanuts Theme Parks and Exhibits”, and “Peanuts’ Philanthropic Impact”. It’s 12 chapters have a total of 37 subtopics according to the table of content, so not much is going to be said about any of these.

Or so I suspect… and I’m not about to invest the money to find out for sure. The book came out last October, and thus far has zero reviews, and no sales ranking. Perhaps if people keep not falling for these things, they will stop being made. I can only hope.

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