Dr Seuss: an all-new classic and not just for kids

The Dr Seuss images are surreal, timeless and still look fresh. And not just for kids

Over the course of a 60-odd-year, 60-odd-book career, Theodore ‘Dr Seuss’ Geisel created a menagerie of fantastical characters living bizarre lives in strange and distant lands. This world in now usually known as ‘Seuss-Ville’ and it’s the kind of place that kids of every age love to hang out in to laugh and learn.

So ubiquitous are the likes of Horton, the Cat in the Hat and the Grinch that rare is the adult who has never encountered a Dr Seuss story. Even if you’ve never seen one of his books, though, introducing them to your kids is a must. So clever and funny is the often-tortuously convoluted verse and so imaginative are the stories that reading Dr Seuss to children is a joy for both of you.

For the uninitiated (hard to believe there are many of those), Dr Seuss wrote short, rhyming illustrated books for kids. The books usually told simple but extraordinary tales, sometimes with morals, but normally they were just an excuse to say silly things.

He wrote more than 60 books, the majority aimed at children, and most are still in print and selling as well as ever. They’re colour-coded according to the complexity of the language and the story, so you can find the right book for any kid from age one upwards.

There are many things that make the books special; the characters are all basic and droopy-looking but never doo-gooders or saints. They’re always mischievous, impish and anarchic – exactly what kids like. The lands they inhabit are vividly and outlandishly drawn, featuring tall, tufty, branchless trees, odd-angled houses and either near-psychedelic or eerily-barren landscapes.

The language is always wondrous: made-up words like ga-fluppted, glikker, sneedle, diffendoofer, schlop and fizza-ma-wizza-ma-dill pepper the pages and somehow make perfect sense in context.

The names of the characters are a particular joy. Many, like the Lorax and Marvin K Mooney, are in the title of the books and relatively well known, but even minor characters are bestowed with marvellously, unnecessarily silly names. Sylvester McMonkey McBean, Miss Fuddle-Dee-Duddle, Organ-Zizzy Zozzfozzel and Organ-McOrgan-McGurkus all bring a smile as they stumble off the tongue. One five-page short story alone (Too Many Daves) features 23 mad names including Bodkin Van Horn, Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face, Oliver Boliver Butt and Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate. Why buy a baby name book when you could just go to Seuss?

Perhaps the most special thing about Dr Seuss is that he allows those with the most un-poetic speaking voice to read lyrically to their children. Even dads with the tone and timbre of Arthur Mullard are turned into a storyteller supreme by Seuss’s magical turns of phrase.

For those who like their children’s books to have moral messages there are also plenty of those in the Seuss canon, though it’s worth noting that the message is never the sole point of the story. The Lorax has an environmental spin, The Sneetches tackles racial equality, but these and many others tell a story first and would work perfectly well if all the moral meaning was removed.

Geisel, a dedicated liberal, even actively fought to stop moral messages that he never intended from being imposed on to his works. When the line “A person’s a person, no matter how small” from Horton Hears A Who! was appropriated by the pro-life movement in the US, he demanded they retract their use of the phrase. They did.

A lot of what Seuss says may seem like nonsense but he was careful that whatever it meant, it was what he meant.

Despite being essentially nonsense verse, occasionally the books can aid good parenting. Over the years there must have been thousands of kids who were convinced to try unfamiliar food by their parents quoting the words “You do not like them, so you say/try them, try them and you may try them and you may I say” from Green Eggs and Ham. Aged just 2, my daughter learnt the alphabet from Dr Seuss’s ABC.

New to Seuss-Ville this September is The Bipollo Seed and Other Lost Stories, a collection of seven previously published but long-missing tales. They’ve been uncovered, re-coloured, tidied up and made available for the first time since the early Fifties. For anyone already beguiled by the genius of Dr Seuss it is a rare opportunity to experience new stories from an author whose daft tales and extraordinary characters have become an integral part of their lives. For those still to fall under his spell: try them, try them and you may.