A set completed and a mystery solved
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
Twenty years ago when I first published a collection of It’s Only a Game by Charles Schulz and Jim Sasseville, I proudly announced that it was the first reprint collection of the strip ever! But then I saw at auction a little pamphlet that looked like this:
and I later found one that looked like this:
…and these confused the heck out of me. They were clearly collections of It’s Only a Game panels, but they were only 8 pages long… and that included the front covers, which were clearly not by Schulz. They didn’t carry any publishing information, and seemed to short and flimsy to be a standard commercial item. I was in contact with the Schulz Museum and Research Center, and they had three of these — the two above, and a fishing one — but they didn’t seem to know where they had come from either, could not explain why they existed. But I knew that I needed to find out, and as both an obsessed book collector and the present publisher of It’s Only a Game, I really wanted a copy of the fishing one as well.
Then earlier this month I saw at auction the thing that would both answer my questions and get me the third and (I presume) final pamphlet in my set. Someone tried to outbid me, but fooey on them, it didn’t work. And today, it arrived in the mail.
So there it was — these were inserts in Schulz-drawn non-Peanuts Hallmark greeting cards. Given the topics of “fishing”, “golfing”, and “bowling”, it seems likely that they are all Father’s Day cards, as those are certainly dad participation sports. I don’t have any expertise at Hallmark products . The code on the back, 35FD 222-4, I’m pretty sure means a 35 cent price, but I’m not sure there are any other clues to the date of release, and I don’t think I can even date it to “when cards cost 35 cents”, as this is a fancier production and may well have cost more than other cards.
(I love the inscription. I like when used items have had a visible life, and in this case, wishing someone a “Happy Second Father’s Day” means that it was likely a young father, with a kid under 2. All neat.)
I continue to think that we need a nice book of all the art that Sparky ever did for Hallmark. (This is me throwing that idea out into the universe for the universe to answer.)
