Stores, moms reckon with 6 Seuss books
When Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced — on what would have been the author’s 117th birthday — that it would stop publication of six of Seuss’ most problematic children’s books, the internet lost its collective mind.
On one end, educators and writers applauded the move as a thoughtful step to remove racist imagery of Black and Asian people from Dr. Seuss’ catalog and preserve the author’s legacy, which spans more than 45 children’s books. Others saw it as an alarming effort to cancel a beloved American figure.
Meanwhile, some in the Bay Area’s literary world were surprised at the fuss.
“Books go out of print all the time, even some of our favorites,” said Summer Dawn Laurie, a children’s book specialist at Books Inc. in San Francisco. Laurie notes that only one of the discontinued titles, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street,” had sold at their stores in the past year, and half of them not since 2017.
“The good news is that there are literally dozens of other Seuss books to share with young readers,” Laurie said.
Aside from “Mulberry Street,” Dr. Seuss’ first children’s book from 1937, the list of discontinued titles includes “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”
Luisa Smith, buying director for Book Passage in the Bay Area, said the store hasn’t carried any of the six titles in years and isn’t seeing increased demand for the discontinued books in the wake of the controversy, despite them now being top sellers on Amazon. While books usually go out of print without fanfare, Smith said, “by making the announcement, Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed out that even famous authors, the ones we grew up with and loved, are not perfect or above criticism.”
It will perhaps come as a shock to know that Seuss himself might have supported the decision.
“It’s important for people to know that Dr. Seuss was someone who became aware of his use of stereotypes in his early work,” said Shellie Cocking, chief of collections at the San Francisco Public Library and a former children’s librarian.
“Many think that ‘Horton Hears a Who!’ was a way of him apologizing,” Cocking adds, also noting that “in 1978, he changed some of the language and eliminated the yellow skin and removed the pigtail from an illustration of a Chinese man in ‘And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.’ ”
In fact, “Horton” is dedicated to Mitsugi Nakamura, the dean of Doshisha University in Kyoto, whom Seuss met while traveling in Japan in the early 1950s. The book is often interpreted as an acknowledgment by Seuss — who
died in 1991 and whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel — that the illustrations he drew as an editorial cartoonist during World War II depicted offensive images of Japanese people.
The library will not remove any of the six titles still in circulation from its shelves, but Cocking encourages parents to check out the library’s resources for diverse children’s books. “It’s so important for children to see themselves reflected in literature in a positive way,” she said.
Parents are also grappling with their love of Dr. Seuss amid these new revelations.
Helena Brantley, who runs Red Pencil Publicity, a book marketing firm in Oakland, said she loved reading Dr. Seuss books to her kids when they were little.
But as she learned more about the decision, it made sense to her.
“It sounds like the organization pulled these six books for a really specific reason,” Brantley said. “For me that feels like leadership. These books were written in the 1930s, a very different time. We should identify things that are problematic and address them. That’s progress.”
When Ethel Rohan’s daughters were young, she read Dr. Seuss to them all the time too. But Rohan, a San Francisco author whose book “In the Event of Contact” comes out in May, said she would not read Seuss’ books to her daughters now or gift them; rather, she wants to invest in more inclusive voices.
“I had no idea his earlier books contained racist caricatures,” Rohan said. “I’ve long questioned whether or not I can separate the artist from the work, and it’s something I struggle with on a casebycase basis. In this instance, I’m not conflicted.”
Janine Macbeth, who runs Blood Orange Press, an independent press in Oakland that focuses on filling representational gaps in children’s books, agrees that these specific Dr. Seuss books should be retired.
“Personally, I would not present these images to small children because they don’t have the analytical abilities or context yet to understand them,” Macbeth said. “At that age we want to be hopeful and consuming things that are positive.”
For her, that still includes the majority of Seuss’ books, which she will continue to read at home.
“I’m seeing the conservative backlash, saying, ‘They just want to burn these books!’ ” she said. “And I think, ‘Of course not! Archive them, and keep them for the historical record.’ ”