And To Think That I Heard It From Some Publishers

Chel Owens

“What’re we gonna do, Fred? These books just ain’t movin.'”

“Hm. I dunno. Which are they, exactly?”

“YOU know -Mulberry Street, that Zoo one, Elliot’s fish… erm, and two or three others even I can’t remember.”

“Oh, yeah. Those deadweights. Hm.” *snap* “I got it!”

“What??”

“Stop printing ’em.”

“Wha -? But the fam-“

“Aaand…”

“And?”

“Say it’s for some hot-button issue. Throw in some questionable quotes from the author; there’s always some handy.”

“Fred.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a genius!”

©2021 Chel Owens
Image ©Dr. Seuss Enterprises, LP

53 thoughts on “And To Think That I Heard It From Some Publishers”

  4. I agree. As a kid reading them I never thought, “Oh, boy! Now I know what the people from that country really look like!” I think that if a person truly thinks it’s objectionable, it’s better to make a teaching moment of it. But there is money involved and Seuss Enterprises has gotten a LOT of free publicity.

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  6. My wife sells books on the side. Overnight, all of her Seuss books sold. She read the news AFTER she packaged them up to ship. She then checked ebay. Yep, the price for all of them went up to about 10 times the price she had them listed. It was funny, because she didn’t have any of the ones they stopped publishing listed, though she had some that were already out of print.

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      2. Hi, LA. Your comment got me DuckDuckGo-ing and it seems most of the articles about this are from around 2015-2017 and not much since. It seems the principal arguments are that Shakespeare made the dreadful mistake of being born a white male a long time ago in England and using some long words and studying him won’t get you a job in social media. Next stop, forget reading the Bible, the Koran etc?. 😉

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  16. History isn’t kind for those who where just living their lives in the times they were…I also read that Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame, because of certain depictions/observations of people that she made as she was living her life… has now been stripped of some award.

    Some of the worlds past has been cruel and sad (as well as what is going on presently in some places). We need to be aware of and remember history, not bury it. How can you start a controversial subject if there isn’t anything on the shelf to use as proof? Some of the more ‘current’ (which is laughable) texts for schools barely address and or wash over very important subjects. You can’t fit 100 years into three paragraphs and call it a day. One should not punish the generations that have come after either. Fair retribution should be amicably worked on.

    Are we to take all the artists that have painted the human body unclothed and toss them and their art out just because some cannot see the beauty of the body? Or what of the poets that speak of love – the definition which has only been limited by human blindness? Do we stifle all creatives and scientists because nothing new needs doing?

    Argg…

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