Oh, the places they’ll go!
Seven little known Dr. Seuss stories from the 1950s will finally be put into book form this fall.
The Guardian reported Thursday that a Massachusetts dentist, Charles Cohen, found the stories. Dr. Seuss’s art director, Cathy Goldsmith, was browsing eBay when she noticed a sale for tearsheets from ’50s publications, purporting to be work by Dr. Seuss, also known as Theodor Seuss Geisel. Goldsmith purchased the stories and learned that the seller, Cohen, was a Seuss scholar and avid collector of Seuss memorabilia.
Cohen, Goldsmith and Random House vice-president and publisher Kate Klimo met up in Massachusetts and Klimo was taken aback by Cohen’s home.
“His house was literally bursting at the seams with Seussiana: plush, toys, beer trays, puzzles and a wide range of ephemera. Not only that, Dr. Cohen was a fount of Seuss information, history and theories about Ted’s artistic process,” Klimo said. “In short order, we had contracted Cohen to write what would become ‘The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss.’ Published in 2003, it was a nearly encyclopedic look at Ted’s [Dr. Seuss’s] career. But through it all, Charles always wanted to compile the stories he had found in various magazines.”
The Bippolo Seed, which the publisher calls “the literary equivalent of buried treasure,” is slated to be published in September. The other stories include “The Strange Shirt Spot,” which inspired the bathtub ring scene in “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.”
These less-talked-about tales are reportedly no less special than Dr. Seuss classics like, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Cat in the Hat,” to name a few.
“The stories are as good as anything in the already-published canon and readers of all ages are in for a treat,” Klimo said.