I’m trying to catch up on my stray books here, but there’s one that I had a problem with when I first went to take care of it, and that problem was… it didn’t seem to exist. I mean, I had a copy of it, because my wife stumbled across it at a bookstore, but Amazon hadn’t heard of it. The website for the store where my wife found it, a Barnes & Noble, doesn;t have it. The book doesn’t have an ISBN number anywhere on it to search. It’s a recent book, copyright 2025, but it was defying the laws of time and space, at least relative to Peanuts.

But now I’ve found a source listing it, so I can prove that this is not just some bizarre mockup I made myself, or the remant of some timeline that disappeared when someone went into the past to prevent World War II.

The Official Crochet Collection: Peanuts is a guide to crocheting figures of not only various popular Peanuts characters (Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Woodstock, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder) but also Peanuts-related projects. There are accountrements for Snoopy (wanna crochet a little bowler hat? A typewriter?), semi-useful objects: a baby blanket with the head of Woodstock, a kids swater featuring Joe Cool, a Christmas stocking with Charlie Brown’s head, a scarf with Snoopy but without his collar so he looks conspicuously naked.

Wait, did I say “sweater”? I should’ve said “jumper”, because this is a UK book and uses UK chrocheting notation, although a US conversion charts provided.

This book is not, however, content to just give you project. It has about a dozen Peanuts strips, mostly full-color Sundays. It has a bunch of spreads about the history of Peanuts, a mix of brief factoid paragraphs and images. And, it has a five-page section teaching you how to crochet. Is it effective? I dunno, I’ve not tried it, I’m not much into fabric arts… but I do have to say that they put together a nice little package. Published by Practical Publishing International, I find the book available at this UK-based online store.

And as long as I’m covering books found for me by family members, a couple months back my daughter came across this It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown sticker book keychain. Twenty stickers in a little book with a clasp, attached to a keychain and another attachment in case you want this dangling from your backpack or somesuch. From a utilitarian point it’s a bit weird, as a keychain is sort of long-term in nature but a sticker book seems like something you’re meant to destroy by sticking the stickers to things, leaving an empty book. But if you wanted stickers to stick you probably just would’ve bought a sheet of stickers for much less.

Sticker books are not by nature something I need for the collection (along with coloring books, notebooks, etc.), but I encouragd her to pick this up for me as something of a novelty… and also to see if it was effectively an adaptation of the special, in which case I’d definitely want to get the A Charlie Brown Christmas one. However, even though there is some effort to put the stickers in the order they appear in the special — the first three stickers are dedicated to Lucy and Linus getting a pumpkin and trying to get it home — you really cannot follow the story of the special from this twenty textless images. And then there’s the fact that there actually isn’t an A Charlie Brown Christmas edition of this; the manufacturer, Pipsticks, offers this one and a winter-themed Snoopy-branded one, and they have a card featuring a sticker of Charlie Brown carrying the sad little tree, but even that they avoid putting the word “Christmas” anywhere in the descriptor. I’d think that if you wanted to make little stocking-stuffer-compatible items like these keychains, you’d want to include the Peanuts special with the most cultural impact (not that Great Pumpkin isn’t a strong second), but perhaps that’s why I’m not a big time sticker magnate.

And as long as I’m posting, a quick reminder that you only have to the end of this month to head to The Anderson Museum of Art of see Schulz’s “Young Pillars” originals on display! If you go there, say “hi!”…. not to anyone in particular mind you. It’s a politeness thing, and Indianans are friendly folk.

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