Nobody ever says Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now, but it was my absolute favorite book for ages when I was a kid. I made my poor father read it to me over and over and over and over again. And now I hear people think it’s about Nixon, wtf?
That was actually titled What Was I Scared Of? – and yes, it was creepy.
I was always interested in his Political Cartoons…
It may not have been about Nixon per se, but it was published around the time of Watergate. Art Buchwald received permission from Dr. Seuss to reprint the entire text of the book in his column, replacing every instance of “Marvin K. Mooney” with “Richard M. Nixon.”
My hidden Seuss treasure is one of only two books Seuss wrote for adults (You’re Only Old Once is the other), and one of the few that was allowed to go out of print. Since Dr. Seuss would have been 100 in 2003, I decided to read with my grandmother every book he had written under the pen name “Dr. Seuss.” We never got farther than The King’s Stilts (so I’m lazy), but that was enough to include The Seven Lady Godvias. This is a very silly book, written in prose. According to Dr. Seuss, what we know about the Lady Godiva legend is wrong- there was not one of them, but seven. They always appeared in public without clothes. And Peeping Tom did not get his name because he looked at one of the seven Godivas- his surname was actually Peeping. Each of the Godivas is in love with one of the Peeping brothers, but after their father is killed in an accident while on horseback, they realize that there is a lot to be learned about the horse. They vow that they will not marry their respective love until they have each learned some truth about horses. These come in the form of common cliches. For example, one of the Godivas attempts to get her horse to drink from a fountain she has ridden to. The horse thinks to himself, “I’d rather die before I drank from that fountain.” So he does. Thus, we learn you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. It’s a rather silly book, but it is quite amusing. (The names of the Peeping brothers start out normal- Peeping Tom, Peeping Bill and such, but in typical Seuss style, the final brother is named Peeping Frelyingheusen. Since there is a local politician whose last name is Frelyingheusen, this amuses me to no end.)
Great link, NPC! I’d never seen those.
I did notice a hole in the Herr Doktor’s c.v. there, though, in between Dartmouth and Mulberry Street. In the early 1930s he was doing some very fine pages, panels and such for a foundering humor magazine called Life (yes, they sold the name a little later). The stuff wanders around freely between the cute (mainly the drawing) and the absurd (much of the writing).
This period of Seuss was anthologized many years ago in a very enjoyable book called The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough. I’m happy to announce that there are currently 3 used copies listed on Amazon.com.
My favorite has always been I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
There’s been more than one otherwise-excellent piece of software with one towering bug or problem in it that has been labeled its “key-slapping slippard”!
Hmm, oddly I don’t see Solla Sollew in Max the Vool’s biblio list. Definitely his, though, and definitely published as a stand-alone book.
Another good book featuring many good Seuss rarities is The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss, which is sort of a visual biography which mainly highlights the Doctor’s lesser-known works.
Also, I wish you would stop swearing in Rumanian.
Yertle the Turtle is supposed to be Adolf Hitler. Although Hitler’s downfall was not actually caused by someone within his own power group (directly), there were some Nazis who attempted to take him down. I’m guessing the story of Yertle the Turtle is meant to show that even the most powerful tyrant can be taken down by the smallest of people.
I always loved Scrambled Eggs Super and And To Think That I saw it on Mulberry Street - the latter because we had mulberry trees in our yard and I thought it was the neatest thing ever.
Oh, goody. Then you come read it to my daughter tonight, 'K? I thought I was going to cry trying to get through that last night. Of course, fact is that I had already read 2 of the really long original Curious George stories, and at that point I think she was just fucking with me.
I’ll chime in with The Sneetches. I know a couple who have a sun, and last year for Halloween, the three of them went as Sneetches. 1 had a star and 2 did not, IIRC.
I do also like Ten Apples Up on Top, and Hop on Pop.
Wiser words were never spoken.
He must be really bright.
What’s his name, Sol?
My all-time favorite is Fox in Sox. I have a copy of it on my shelf I bought as an adult (just for me). Just for fun, I memorized the entire tweetle beetle battle. I was a hit at parties with that one I tell ya.
As a kid, I also enjoyed the **ABC Book ** (except I had to skip “G.” Goo-goo Goggles scared me). One Fish, Two Fish… was good.
But one that I remember reading when I was about 6 or so was Bartholomew and the Ooobleck. I loved that one! A lot of people remember that kid with the hats, but when I mention the oobleck people look at me like I was nuts.
Oh, McWUPPAAA.
Me too. Loved the “mystic men who eat boiled owls.”
Although the ending was a cop-out:The Ooobleck goes away because the King is really, really sorry? That’s not how things worked when I was a kid
:o
Ooops.
Oh…so many. We owned “Hop on Pop,” from which I learned words such as “Constantinople and Timbuktu.” Only years later did I figure out that they were REAL words, and what they meant. But I was the only kid in my kindergarten class that knew them. Needless to say, it was our father’s LEAST favorite book (I don’t know how his abs withstood the abuse).
The story “What was I Scared Of” (the green pants story) freaked the crap out of me as a young’n.
But I have to go with “On Beyond Zebra” as my all-time favorite. I read it in first grade, and it positively blew my mind. Up until that point, the focus had been on my learning my ABC’s: that is, the 26 letters of the English alphabet. Up until getting my hands on a copy of OBZ, I had thought that the 26 letters were all there was.
This book totally changed my brain when I was six. Not only did it plant the idea that there could be more letters than I was being taught in school, but that led me to the discovery that there ARE.
Thirty-five years later, I still find myself being fascinated with (and collecting) alphabets, scripts, and writing systems from all over the world. In fact, I originally bought the Lord of the Rings trilogy because of the appendices in the back with the dwarvish runes and the elvish tengwar.
(I did eventually read them, too.)
Writing systems fascinate me, and it all started with that book.
Dr. Seuss totally rocks.