SCHULZ, Charles M.
Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking.
[New York]: United Feature Syndicate [Good Housekeeping] , 1963.
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First Edition of Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking; Schulz's First Christmas Book, Originally Issued as a 1963 Good Housekeeping Supplement
First edition of Schulz's first Christmas book, created expressly and exclusively for the December 1963 issue of Good Housekeeping, in which it appeared as a removable supplement. Slim octavo, original pictorial wrappers, illustrated throughout by Schulz with line drawings of the Peanuts cast and comprising fifteen captioned vignettes. Predating both his picture book Christmas Is Together-Time (1964) and the beloved television special A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), this gentle sequence represents Schulz's earliest sustained treatment of the holiday, gathering Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy and Sally for a run of seasonal gags that range from the comic to the quietly philosophical, including the memorable declaration, "I'm not going to hang up a Christmas stocking this year... I've decided it's not scriptural!" A fragile piece of Peanuts ephemera that rarely survives. In very good condition in the original pictorial wrappers, with toning and a few short closed tears and small chips to the wrapper edges. An appealing example of the earliest appearance of Schulz's enduring Christmas world.
Created expressly and exclusively by Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) for Good Housekeeping, Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking first appeared as a removable booklet bound into the December 1963 issue of the magazine. It marked Schulz's first non-strip treatment of Christmas, a theme to which he would return the following year in the picture book Christmas Is Together-Time and, most famously, in the 1965 CBS television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, whose mixture of comedy, melancholy and earnest spiritual reflection it anticipates. By 1963 Peanuts, launched in 1950, was among the most widely syndicated comic strips in the world, and the Christmas Stocking captures its cast (Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy and Sally) in a sequence of captioned vignettes that balance the strip's characteristic gentle humor with its undercurrent of childhood longing and wonder. The booklet was later collected and reprinted by Fantagraphics Books.
Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking.
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