By Brian Boone
Today is the day that the day is March 3rd,
And we wish to have with you reader, a word.
We tell you the truth, it isn’t a ruse:
Today marks the birthday of the great Dr. Seuss
We think you will find these facts about him quite fine,
As you’re reading them there, at your desk or stuck in line.
Do you think it’s quite bad? To start out making ads?
While drawing cartoons for Judge magazine in the 1920s, Theodor Geisel made one depicting a knight using Flit-brand insecticide to kill a dragon. Flit’s advertising agency, McCann-Erikson, saw the cartoon and hired Geisel onto its in-house creative team. “Quick Henry, the Flit!” was a well-known advertising catchphrase at the time, and Geisel came up with it.
Nobody wanted to see such a book, until someone decided to give it a look
As long as he wrote under a pen name, Geisel could pursue other creative projects, and in the 1930s he decided he wanted to write and draw simple picture books directed at very young readers. His first book, To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by 27 different book publishers. Vanguard Press put it out in 1937, and it sold so well that Geisel — writing under the name Dr. Seuss (the latter is his middle name) that he could quit the ad business and just make kids’ books.
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To win up the money, he must stay quite thrifty, for his words must not exceed 50
By the late 1950s, Geisel was one of the most consistently bestselling authors around, and through Random House he published works like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat. With his audience of children in mind, Geisel wrote with only simple, easily understood words. So, he took a $50 bet from his house’s founder, Bennett Cerf: Write a book using 50 different words or less. He did it, and that book was 1960’s Green Eggs and Ham. Geisel believed it was his funniest book, but he also claimed that Cerf never paid him the 50 bucks.
What’s in a name? A lot’s in a name? Even for someone of fame who used lots of names
“Seuss” is commonly mispronounced. (We even did it up there in the introduction.) Traditionally, and by Geisel’s family both during his lifetime and now, pronounce it like it rhymes with “choice,” not like it rhymes with “deuce.” And Dr. Seuss is far from Geisel’s only pen name. He variously wrote under fake names like L. Pasteur, Theo LeSieg (“Geisel” reversed), Theophrastus Seuss, and Rossetta Stone.
His first big success may sound rather dirty, but words had different meanings in 1930
One of Dr. Seuss’s first books was a runaway hit, but his name didn’t appear on the cover and it was marketed to adults, not children. A collection of four shorter, cheaper forgotten paperbacks printed between 1931 and 1932, The Pocket Book of Boners became one of the top selling books in the U.S. during the World War II years. “Boners” at this point in history referred to errors, mistakes, or misinformation, and Seuss compiled dozens of those along with illustrations in the book that would eventually sell more than 1.3 million copies.