Good Ol' Charlie Brown #[nn]
Good Ol' Charlie Brown (August 1957, Rinehart & Company / Holt, Rinehart and Winston) is the fourth collected volume of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts newspaper strip, gathering daily and Sunday strips from 1955–1957 at a moment when the cast—Charlie Brown, Lucy, Schroeder, Snoopy, and Violet Gray among them—was actively settling into the personalities that would define the strip for decades. As one of the earliest trade paperback anthologies of an American newspaper comic strip, it helped establish the commercial template for selling syndicated strip collections directly to a mass book-buying audience, a practice that would explode across the industry in the 1960s and beyond. The strips inside also capture a transitional phase of Schulz's draftsmanship: Snoopy still sports a longer nose and leaner silhouette, Lucy and Linus read younger than their 'permanent' ages, and characters like Violet and Shermy still occupy prominent roles they would gradually cede to newer additions. In that sense the volume functions as a crucial developmental document of one of the most culturally far-reaching comic strips ever produced.
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
Rinehart & Company—which would merge into Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1960—had been publishing Peanuts strip collections since the debut volume in July 1952, making this series among the very first sustained publisher commitments to collecting American newspaper comics in trade paperback form. Good Ol' Charlie Brown was the fourth entry in that original series, issued in August 1957; the books were modest 5½-by-8-inch black-and-white softcovers running approximately 120 pages, with two daily strips per page or one Sunday strip per page. All story and art was solely by Charles M. Schulz, whose syndication contract with United Feature Syndicate stipulated that no other hand would ever draw the strip—a fact reflected in the copyright notice on the volume's copyright page, which reads 1955–1957 by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Fourth volume in the original Rinehart & Company / Holt, Rinehart and Winston Peanuts reprint series; first published August 1957.
- Written and drawn entirely by Charles M. Schulz; all story and art by a single creator, consistent with his syndication contract with United Feature Syndicate.
- Reprints daily and Sunday Peanuts newspaper strips originally published between 1955 and 1957.
- Format: black-and-white softcover (and later hardcover editions), approximately 5½ × 8 inches, roughly 120 pages, with two daily strips per page or one Sunday strip per page.
- Characters appearing include Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt, Schroeder, Snoopy, Violet Gray, Linus, Patty (not Peppermint Patty), Shermy, and Pig-Pen—several of whom Schulz would later retire from the strip.
- The strips capture an early visual style in which Snoopy has a noticeably longer nose and slimmer body than his later design, and the core cast reads as younger than their eventual 'permanent' ages.
- Content from this volume was later split and reprinted as two Fawcett Crest mass-market paperbacks: Fun with Peanuts (Vol. 1, selected cartoons from Good Ol' Charlie Brown) and Here Comes Charlie Brown (Vol. 2), both beginning with a first Crest printing in June 1964.
- A facsimile edition of the equivalent Canadian fourth Peanuts collection (originally published by Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd. of Toronto) was later issued by Titan Comics in 2015, keeping the 1955–1957 strip content in print for a new generation.