The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories

by Dr. Seuss
introduction by Charles D. Cohen
Random House  2011

Seven previously published magazine stories by the late Bard of Beginner Books, collected in book form for the first time.

The story of this collection has been in the news a lot lately, and certainly been on a lot of folks' radar since its publication announcement in the spring. The idea that there was enough Seuss that hadn't been seen widely since the 1950s is certainly newsworthy, although the nostalgia market being what it is it's impossible to not fear that the collection would consist of inferior material deliberately abandoned by Theodore Geisel for good reason. That said, with a market that consists of a half century full of people who learned to read on Seuss titles there was no way you could risk the reputation of the master by putting out an inferior product. No, it would be impossible to toss of a collection of rejects and risk the ire of Boomers who would pillory those attempting to profit from junk.

The Bippolo Seed is, like others, a collection of tales featuring familiar Seuss characters, animals, morals, and above all, that cadence, that anapestic tetrameter that is as distinctly Seuss as iambic pentameter is to Shakespeare. To read the book, to start a Seuss story new to the eye, it is almost impossible to not begin by reading aloud. It's as if something deep is tapped in the root memory of our reading brain that triggers this connection between when we first learned to read and how one is "supposed" to read Seuss. There is probably a paper on cognitive science about this (or if there isn't there should be) and to do so, to read this Seuss collection aloud, reveals some interesting information about these early stories and the development of that cadence we know by heart and memory.

Gustav's original magazine appearance

Writing for magazines, space was necessarily limited. Seuss was either asked or pitched his stories to fill two or four or five pages (best to fill a layout) and his illustrations would need to fit around the text, and vice versa. In some cases the magazine pages would contain multiple layouts on a single page. The effect this has is that there are large chunks of text to accompany a single illustration, and with the stories in The Bippolo Seed already we can feel, intrinsically, that something isn't quite right. The lines are long, longer than they would be for a beginning reader, occasionally spilling into the next line in a way that reads far more complicated than their later Beginner Book components. They also explain more than they show, no doubt another necessary component of their magazine straitjacket. But then, of course, these were stories meant to be read to a child, no by a child. Their presentation in an adult magazine was clearly aimed at parents (mothers) to use at storytime. Lap-sitters weren't expected to follow along with the text, or make connections between pictures and language the way they would with The Cat in the Hat or even Horton Hears a Who.

To be sure, these aren't second-rate Seuss stories, nor are they the way the good Doctor would have chosen to present them in book form had he the chance to come back to this world and guide us. "Gustav, the Goldfish" already got the book treatment when his wife at the time Helen Palmer converted it to Fish Our of Water, though seeing the story told in rhyme gives it a greater feeling of urgency. "The Bippolo Seed" with it's tale of endless wishing and greed follows the typical Seussian mold of a cumulative story that would sit nicely between If I Ran the Zoo, though a more direct connection can be found in "The Great Henry McBride" and his daydreaming of multiple occupations – from a time when holding down more than one job wasn't out of economic necessity!  "The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga," beyond being a mouthful that can get tricky to catch the rhythms, offers a story of quick-thinking that would be suitable filler as a shorter story in any Seuss collection. "Steak for Supper" and it's Mulberry Street location suggests a possible sequel to the book that started it all back in 1937, and "The Strange Shirt Spot" has seen print before... as the stain-in-the-tub sequence from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Of the seven stories presented the weakest and most derivative is "Tadd and Todd" which suggests Seuss' attempt to give his spin to another pair of twin T's, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, though with a more post-Freudian case of identity crisis.

text in search of an illustration (or two). double click for a larger view

If these stories can be said to be lacking anything it is more illustrations. Naturally, if they had more illustrations they wouldn't have fit the magazines, nor would they be collectible in a single book. I remember when The Lorax originally appeared as a magazine feature (yes, I am that old) it didn't matter than I'd already read the story, I wanted the book version for its additional illustrations and that "real book" feel. As much as any master in the field, Seuss knew how to pace a story and set-up those page turns, and it's that touch that is missing here. The words sit in their little blocks, and the illustrations have been expertly reproduced and colored, but that sense of flow, those layouts that force the eye across the page, back and forth between word and image, that's missing here in The Bippolo Seed.

That said, there are few who can do what Dr. Seuss did, and even with their minor flaws and limitations, its nice that there is a new Seuss for a new generation to have as their own. And for those older Seuss fans its an even better reminder of what can and should be expected in terms of books for young readers.

Why I Built the Boogle House

by Helen Palmer
with photographs by Lynn Fayman
Random House / Beginner Books  1964

A boy trades up from a turtle to increasing larger pets, building and modifying homes for them, until finally he has a house big enough for a Boogle. (What's a Boogle?)

It starts with a turtle, a pet this boy has always wanted.  He builds a house for it to live in out of wood.  The next day the turtle has run away.  He wants a new pet.  He goes down to the pond and snatches a duck.  The duck doesn't fit in the turtle house so he modifies the house until the duck fits.  But the duck is noisy so he trades it for a kitten.  Now the house is too small for a kitten, so he builds it up until it's large enough. This goes on.  Kitten for a rabbit, rabbit for a dog, dog for a goat, goat for a horse. When the house for a horse draws the attention of the police who inform him that he can't keep a horse in his backyard the boy decides to dedicate the house to the imaginary Boogle he hopes to catch one day.  In the meantime he has outfitted his Boogle house into a rather nice private clubhouse with plants and a beaded curtain.

I love the innocence of children's books from the early days.  So free of concerns about children emulating behavior and notions of property and fears of litigation.  There's a reason this book is out of print, and it has nothing to do with the dated photos from the early 1960s.

Putting aside the problems of appropriating ones pets from local ponds (and the lack of concern for feeding any of the pets, which is perhaps why they tend to run away or become a nuisence) what Why I Built the Boogle House has going for it is the unbridled enthusiasm this boy has in building homes for these animals.  That and a seemingly endless supply of lumber and access to hand tools.  I'm not even going to pretend that this book didn't somehow inspire me to want to do the same thing (and longtime readers may remember I once tried to convince my parents to let me have a pet squirrel in our apartment when I was around 6 years old).

What this dated title by Dr. Seuss's first wife gets right is the mindset of a boy, albeit short-sighted in some ways, who recognizes that caring for a pet means providing for it as best he can.  In the pre-feminist way that dolls and doll play helped girls prepare for their lives as housewives and mothers, boys with their ownership of pets helped condition them to the notion of having and providing for families.  Trading up, the great American Dream of building bigger and better, the idea of not only making something with your hands but doing so with a purpose, these are the messages that truly explain why the boy, anyone really, sets out to build a Boogle house.  The Boogle, though the boy thinks he's hedging his bets by building for something that cannot be outgrown, is actually the future, his future.  The Boogle house his is retirement plan, his real estate venture, his safety net.  We build toward the eventuality of what we one day might need. It is a lesson about saving and planning, and one we have drifted far from in the past 50 years.

As best as I can tell, Helen Palmer published four children's books under her name, the only one still in print being A Fish Out of Water which was originally a story by Dr. Seuss called "Gustav the Goldfish" which appeared in Redbook magazine in 1950.  The other three books – Why I Built the Boogle House, Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday, and I Was Kissed By a Seal at the Zoo – are decidedly different in that they use black and white photos (which conventional wisdom claims don't age well with readers) and feature situations and ideas which are no longer in favor with modern reader.  Or rather, they are no longer in favor with adults, because as Maurice Sendak reminds us, “Books don’t go out of fashion with children. They just go out of fashion with adults and publishers.”

I hunted these books down because they became dislodged from the deep storage of my memory banks and I wanted to understand why they had disappeared both in print and from memory.  For the most part I think the memory question is answered with "out of sight, out of mind." Many of not most of the books from my childhood never survived my childhood. Either from neglect on my part or destruction at the hands of my younger sibling, or perhaps in one of my mother's general purges (which might also explain my book hoarding... hmm), few of the books I owned made it into my teen years. Decades later, as memories of childhood books began to resurface I became driven to locate as many as possible, if for no other reason that reassure myself that I wasn't crazy – those books did exist!  Yes, it turns out, there was a children's book where a boy fires guns at a rifle range with the Marines, and another where kids play with lion cubs, and even a picture book by Aldous Huxley. There are some pretty interesting nuggets when you go digging around the past in children's literature.

With that in mind, later this week I'll be looking at the two other books by Palmer and casually examining how things have changed for both children and books since the early 1960s.  I would love to hear what your memories were of children's books from the past, not just the Helen Palmer books but about any. What books have gone out of print in your time, what lost treasures have you gone looking for?