Schulz’s other It’s Only A Game

One of the fun things that I get to do here from time to time is to sort out different Schulz books which have the same title, when some publisher either didn’t know or didn’t care that that particular book name had been used before.

And now, at this late date, I discover that I may have been one of those publishers!

As many of you know, with my publisher hat on, I put out the first book collection of Schulz’s single-panel cartoon feature, “It’s Only a Game”, and in a burst of creativity I named it It’s Only a Game (hey, look, that’s a link! If you don’t have a copy, I think that clicking the link and buying one would be a good idea, don’t you?) And then, after decades of collecting Peanuts books, in an auction I see this item which I’d never seen before:

"It's Only a Game" Peanuts keychain book cover

What this is is one of a series of little sorta-books put out by Hallmark in the 1970s; there’s a keychain ring, and the pages are each attached through a hole, and you flip through them. I have one or two of thee in my collection, but this one, I’d never seen before (and still have not actually seen it; failing to pay attention, I let myself be outbid for it.)

Making this discovery even more frustrating is the fact that the other keychain books I know of are simply reformatted versions of little hardcover Hallmark books… which means there may also be a little hardcover It’s Only a Game book which I don’t know of and don’t have.

AAUGH!

 

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