Some of you may remember that when I announced the publication of It’s Only a Game, the collection of Schulz’s non-Peanuts syndicated newspaper cartoon from the late ’50’s, I stated that none of these cartoons had ever been in a book before.

Well, it’s a good thing I said “book”, not “pamphlet”, because an odd little thing has come to light: a little eight-page pamphlet of seven It’s Only a Game golfing cartoons. The cartoons are in black and white, although the front cover image is in color. For those of you with copies of It’s Only a Game, you can find the included on page 77, 119, 140, 151, 162, 170, and 199 of that book.
When I published the book, I didn’t know of this pamphlet’s existence. I only learned about it when the Schulz museum had their It’s Only a Game exhibit, and they had one on display… but they didn’t know quite what it was. They thought it might be a mockup for something never produced.

However, one showed up at auction a couple weeks back, and that suggests that this was something that was produced and distributed… but it’s still not clear to whom. It doesn’t look like something that was distributed for sale, being too small in all ways to be something likely to be sold. It carries no price, and no publisher information. There’s no copuright or printing date to reveal when this was published (although I’m betting it was early 1960s at the latest, as It’s Only a Game was a short-lived, unsuccesful work that languished in obscurity for decades.) Was this a giveaway item of some sort? Part of some little golfing gift kit? It’s probably almost fifty years old (the cartoons included come from between March and November of 1958), and such a minor item that even those who were involved in its production, if they could be found, may well not remember it. So this is a mystery that may never be solved.

Those of you who have been studying It’s Only a Game may have noticed those dates and realized something else about this booklet – none of the finished artwork in it is by Schulz himself. All of the cartoons would have been from after Jim Sasseville took over doing the finished artwork based on Schulz’s designs. The cover doesn’t strike me as being Schulz or Sasseville.

As I said, I saw this for auction. Alas, there is not one now in the AAUGH.com reference library; the price went higher than I was comfortable bidding. If anyone out there sees another one available or has any information on the history of this item, email me at nat@AAUGH.com

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