“Lost” Dr. Seuss Stories Found

Fans of Dr. Seuss take heart! Seven stories by the writer, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, will be published by Random House in September 2011. The tales will be combined in a book titled The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories and, according to a Random House executive, are in a league with the author’s other works that include the highly acclaimed and much adored The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Among the stories in the new book are Gustav the Goldfish, an early, rhymed version of A Fish Out of Water and The Strange Shirt Spot, which is similar to the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back

A dentist and avid collector of Dr. Seuss memorabilia discovered the stories in old 1950s magazines. Subsequently, Cathy Goldsmith, Geisel/Seuss’s long-time art director, came upon tear sheets from the magazines posted in an e-Bay auction. Goldsmith contacted the seller, dentist Charles Cohen of Springfield, and introduced him to Random House. The Bippolo Seed will include an introduction by Cohen who is the author of The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing but the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

The first of Seuss’ forty-four books, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, appeared in 1937 after being rejected by publishers twenty-seven times. Seuss, born in 1904, died in 1991, having written such favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go and Fox in Sox. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages. In addition to the books, Seuss’ works have provided the source for eleven children’s television specials, a Broadway musical and feature-length movies. For his work, Theodor Seuss Geisel garnered two Academy Awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize for his lifetime commitment to literature.

Geisel began to develop children’s books for beginning readers having read that children were bored by the books available. His publisher provided a list of four hundred words and challenged him to write a book using about two hundred fifty of them. The result was The Cat in the Hat that used two hundred thirty-six of the words and was an instant success. Now, with The Bippolo Seed, new readers and those who already love Dr. Seuss’ work have a delight in store. Oh, the places they’ll go!

For more information about the publisher, visit www.randomhouse.com