Antiques Roadshow

GUEST

I worked for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Missouri, before moving to California 33 years ago. I was a Peanuts fan for a long time and came up with the idea to use Peanuts on greeting cards. And I had to sell the idea to the creative committee. As a result, they ended up with a whole big line of Hallmark Peanuts products. And I went out to work with Charles Schulz in 1960 for the first time, and worked with him for 12 years in developing all the Hallmark Peanuts' products. And he gave me some of the original strips and some of the original artwork. This was a group of drawings that he did for a product we called "Snoopy's Daily Dozen." It was an exercise booklet.

APPRAISER

Okay.

GUEST

And this is an original strip that he signed and gave to me. These are pencil drawings of some of the greeting cards that we developed. We would come up with the ideas for the greeting cards, he would do the pencil sketches, send them back, and we'd come back with little fixes, like "Make this a full figure," or "Add bells here." And this is Schulz's pencil, and these are my pencil comments on them. These are Sunday strips, and then this is an original strip that he did from 1957 to '59, and it's called "It's Only a Game." He was a great, humble person that had a tremendous insight into human nature, as millions of Peanuts fans will tell you.

APPRAISER

Sure.

GUEST

I idolized this man's talent. To meet him and work with him for 12 years was just great.

APPRAISER

Let me give you an idea on what you have and what the value is.

GUEST

Okay.

APPRAISER

There are three factors, when I'm doing an appraisal like this, that I'm going to take into consideration. First is freshness to the market. And obviously, it's never been out on the market, totally fresh, you've had it all these years, which is tremendous. Second is the age of the material, and it's really vintage, perfect Peanuts period-- late '50s into the early '60s, nothing later than that. And the third factor is the characters involved. Everywhere you look,

you see nothing but key characters

Snoopy, Charlie, Linus, Lucy. What we have here in the bottom panel, you have 14 of these "Daily Exercise" large panels. The estimates I'm going to give you are basically conservative auction estimates. And the sky's the limit when it comes to Charles Schulz stuff-- it's the hottest comic art right now on the market. Easily, I would estimate each of these at $6,000 to $9,000.

GUEST

Each?

APPRAISER

Each. Each piece. Now, there's 14 of them, okay? Now, when we go up here onto your daily... It's fantastic. You have Charlie in all four panels, and it's early '60s, I think, or '61. Okay, again,

conservative estimate

$8,000 to $10,000 for that daily. When you jump up here to the pencil roughs, you have a nice little grouping here. Not as attractive to collectors, but still historically very important. And a conservative estimate on that would be $4,000 to $6,000 as a group. When you come over here to "It's Only a Game," since it's not a Peanuts related strip, I don't know if it's going to be as interesting to the Peanuts collector as it might be if it had any of the characters in it. But still, just from a historic point of view, you got to estimate these at $4,000 to $6,000 each. Now, Sunday pages are really desirable, and these are terrific. You have Linus and Lucy, you have Linus, Lucy and Snoopy. Great years, I think these are '59. And on a conservative side, I'm going to estimate these anywhere from $12,000 to $18,000 each.

GUEST

My God!

APPRAISER

I think if you add it all up, I wouldn't be surprised to see you come out anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 on a piece-by-piece basis.

GUEST

You're kidding.

APPRAISER

Absolutely not. And if you're going to insure it, you'd probably want to insure it for a little bit more than the high estimate.

GUEST

I was going to say, I had these on a shelf in my closet, and I think...

APPRAISER

Not a good place for them anymore.

GUEST

Not a good place for them anymore. Wow.