This is from Curt Alliaume…
There were three different series of paperbacks from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston/Henry Holt:
1. The series shown on your site, with a trim size of about 5" x 8" and uncoated paper covers. For what it's worth, some or most also appear to have been printed on a fairly cheap text stock, which yellowed fairly easily. There were also at least a couple of books (probably of Sunday strips only) printed in an oblong format (trim size more like 8" x 5-1/2"). It appears HRW reissued the books in the early '70s on slightly better text stock with new, more modern covers on coated stock (cheaper than the uncoated covers).
2. In the mid-'70s, HRW reissued all the old books in a larger 7" x 10" format, incorporating about 1-1/2 books in each of the books in the new trim size, and issuing new books at that size as well. Text stock was a good white stock, not likely to yellow. About 24 books were issued of this size through 1984, the last under the Henry Holt imprint after the company was sold.
3. In 1993 or so, the books were again split up, some issued under new titles, and confusingly some under the same titles as the '70s books, even if they didn't include the same strips. Trim size was again 5" x 8", but the paper was a good white stock — however, the internal pages don't look great, because I believe the new books were shot from tear sheets of the '70s books, rather than scanned from original strips. (Also, 7" x 10" is now an uneconomical trim size to print and bind.) These are hard to come by because they weren't printed in huge numbers. When I was director of production at Holt in 1999, we discussed briefly what to do about the books, but decided they just weren't selling in great numbers to justify another reissue. I think Topper/Pharos Books (owned by Schulz's syndicator and distributed by St. Martin's Press, where I worked for most of 1985-2000) discovered that as well. Schulz's sales were down because there was so much product. He was with a few other publishers (such as HarperCollins) until 2000.
I do admit to having the idea of getting all of the strips, including the ones that hadn't been printed before, and proposing it to Holt – I'm glad Fantagraphics was able to do the job right.
So am I…and I hope the three illos I selected correspond accurately to the three series you itemize.
Too much product may have been part of the problem but I suspect a big reason that Mr. Schulz's reprint collections stopped selling was because the folks putting out the books kept changing formats and recycling the same strips in different volumes. There were also those small paperback collections from Fawcett that featured some of the strips from the Holt Rinehart books. It got very confusing to figure out which Peanuts books to buy and which to skip if you just wanted one copy of each strip with no dupes. In many companies, there's often been a tendency to divide the potential market into two categories — die-hard collectors and casual readers. The die-hards, it is thought, aren't large enough in number to warrant catering to their concerns…and they'll probably buy it, anyway. So you cater to the casuals (who don't care about completeness) and forget that there's a middle category in there. There are people who'd like to buy the series and build a little library to read and to have on a shelf in their homes.
At some point in the seventies, it got to be impossible to figure out which newly-released Peanuts books contained strips that had never been reprinted before and which were repackagings of earlier reprint books. I think there were a few that were a combo. At some point in there, I — a devout Schulz fan — threw up my hands, went "AUGGHH!" and stopped trying. I can only imagine how many of the less fanatical readers they lost. Anyway, thanks for the info, Curt. Very helpful.