And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street

New York: Vanguard Press, Inc, 1937. Book Club Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Good. Theodore Seuss Geisel. Illustrated Endpapers. Illustrations (color). Cover worn. The title page contains the statement "Book Club Distribution of Beginner Book Edition distributed by Grolier Enterprises, Ind. by arrangement with the original publisher Vanguard Press, Inc." Book Club Edition printed at the bottom of the page facing the title page. This is believed to be the first Book Club Edition of Dr. Seuss's first children's book. By linking text and image, the book helps children follow the story even if they cannot read every word of the text. Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904 -1991) was an American children's author, cartoonist, illustrator, poet, animator, and filmmaker. He is known for writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss. His work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages. Geisel adopted the name "Dr. Seuss" as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College. He began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for Vanity Fair, Life, and other publications. He worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, most notably for Standard Oil, and as a political cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM. He published his first children's book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937. During WWII, he illustrated political cartoons, and he worked in the animation and film department of the Army where he wrote, produced or animated many productions including Design for Death, which won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 1961, the book was given the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. After the war, Geisel returned to writing children's books, writing classics like If I Ran the Zoo (1950), Horton Hears a Who! (1955), The Cat in the Hat (1957), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960), The Sneetches (1961), The Lorax (1971), The Butter Battle Book (1981), and Oh, the Places You'll Go (1990). His books have spawned numerous adaptations, including 11 television specials, five feature films, a Broadway musical, and four television series. Geisel won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association. He also received two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Children's Special for Halloween is Grinch Night (1978) and Outstanding Animated Program for The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat (1982). And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is Theodor Seuss Geisel's first children's book published under the pen name Dr. Seuss. First published by Vanguard Press in 1937, the story follows a boy named Marco, who describes a parade of imaginary people and vehicles traveling along a road, Mulberry Street, in an elaborate fantasy story he dreams up to tell his father at the end of his walk. However, when he arrives home, he decides instead to tell his father what he actually saw—a simple horse and wagon. Geisel conceived the core of the book aboard a ship in 1936, returning from a European vacation with his wife. The rhythm of the ship's engines captivated him and inspired the book's signature lines: And that is a story that no one can beat And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street. At least 20 publishers rejected the book before Geisel ran into an old college classmate, who had just become juvenile editor at Vanguard Press. Vanguard agreed to publish the book, and it met with high praise from critics upon release. Later analyses of the book have focused on its connections to Geisel's childhood; the street of the title is probably named after a street in Geisel's hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. Geisel returned to fictionalized versions of Springfield in later books, and Marco appeared again in 1947 in the Dr. Seuss book McElligot's Pool. Clifton Fadiman wrote a one-sentence review in The New Yorker, which Geisel could still quote near the end of his life: "They say it's for children, but better get a copy for yourself and marvel at the good Dr. Seuss' impossible pictures and the moral tale of the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but too well."[19] The New York Times wrote, "Highly original and entertaining, Dr Seuss' picture book partakes of the better qualities of those peculiarly America institutions, the funny papers and the tall tale. It is a masterly interpretation of the mind of a child in the act of creating one of those stories with which children often amuse themselves and bolster up their self-respect."