Doctor Seuss: A Different Perspective

Historical Note on Dr. Seuss’ Sight-Vocabulary Readers by Donald L. Potter

Dear Sam (Blumenfeld), [10/2/2010]

William Spalding of Macmillan publishing was the son of Frank E. Spaulding, author of the popular 1907 Aldine reading series and the Yale Dean of Education! Frank E. Spaulding studied under Wilhelm Wundt in Germany. William Spalding, author of the Macmillan look-and-say reading series, was “zealous in his conviction that a new lively kind of primer could arrest the growing illiteracy among children.” I guess, Sam, since look-and-say wasn’t working, they thought they would figure out a better way to do look-and-and-say: Pour more gas on the fire to put it out.

This is from Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography by Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan.

We know why Spalding was noticing “growing illiteracy.”

Let me quote some more, “Phillis Cerf had been researching every primer in print, cross-matching word lists until she came up with 379 words from which their contract authors could chose 200, plus twenty easy-to-pronounce “emergency words” for each book. … For Beginner Books, these were the honeymoon months. The new company borrowed two hundred thousand dollars from Random House and began to sign contract authors and artists. Ted and Phyllis agreed to undertake printing of about sixty thousand copies of each Beginner Book. The management was cozy, absorbed and united in creating an innovative way of blending words and illustrations to teach reading. But everyone involved tended to explain the adventure from a different perspective. For the instigator William Spalding who remained an outsider, it was an assault on illiteracy. From his office downstairs, Bennett Cerf looked with awe on the casual launching of this series of children’s readers, soon calling it the “most profitable single publishing entity ever created.” Phillis talked of merging Ted’s “happy genius” with the prosaic but precise science vocabulary word lists. Helen remembered the astonishing journeymen writers who discovered that they simply could not create a book using only two or three hundred words. … Random House soon estimated that it had become the largest publisher of children’s books in America. … Though The Cat in the Hat occupied a triumphant niche in juvenile publishing, William Spalding, the man who had suggested the venture, receded into the blackground. As Houghton Mifflin’s Richard Gladstone, assigned to market The Cat to schools, recalls: “The reader was essentially a Houghton Mifflin project, but we never knew how many we sold. Thousands (of Random’s trade edition] went into schools through jobbers … Random was making more money from this that we were, [and] very rarely in reports of Beginner Books was there any mention of Houghton Mifflin or of Bill Spalding.” Bennett Cerf had lent his author to Houghton Mifflin and then ran away with the book. The bizarre agreement between the two publishers to share Ted continued through The Cat in the Hat Comes Back and an educational edition of Yertle the Turtle, until finally Houghton Mifflin sold its rights to Random House. Then Ceft made an even bigger move. He had marveled at the spiraling profits of the Beginner Books and finally could no longer endure being merely lender and distributor. He had begun to have dreams of empire, he was readying Random House for a merger with some major communications company, and he wanted Beginner Books and its top line tucked neatly inside. In the fiscal year ending April 30, 1960 Beginner Books had a sales volume far exceeding a million dollars. By the end of the year eighteen titles were in bookstores, including a new group of Beginning Reader Books to supplement the earliest school readers. Eventually more than a hundred books were published.


Here is a quote from the book concerning how Geisel wrote Green Eggs and Ham, “Ted had met Cerf’s challenge by writing Green Eggs and Ham with a vocabulary of precisely 50 words. His work sheets were evidence of his marathon wordplay; charts, lists, number counts – mundane bookkeeping that were words removed from its results, the exquisite nonsense of Sam-I-am. The statistics of Ted’s ordeal were ground into his memory. The words he had used most were “not” (eighty-two times) and “I” (eighty-one times). Each word was monosyllabic except “anywhere” (eight times). Ted made obsessive demands on himself that they exceeded any quality control ever demanded on any editor. But with the dare that led to Green Eggs, Cerf had proven himself the idea publisher for Ted. He as an unabashed, beguiled fan who revered his author and his work almost without reservation. Of Ted he said, “You don’t tell Joe DiMaggio how to hit the ball.” He liked to astonish audiences by naming distinguished authors of Random House – Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner and John O’Hara – and to conclude that Ted, alone among them, was a genius.”