New Dr. Seuss Book to be Published in July

February 2015 may well be remembered as the month lost works by beloved authors were uncovered. First, of course, the To Kill a Mockingbird prequel, due now to be published this summer. And now a lost (or perhaps discarded) Dr. Seuss book, What Pet Should I Get? has come to light. From The New York Times:

Random House has announced the publication on July 28 of “What Pet Should I Get?,” the story of a brother and sister searching for the newest member of the family. The manuscript had been in a box that was discovered in the home of Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel) in the La Jolla section of San Diego, shortly after his death in 1991, and set aside. In 2013, Mr. Geisel’s widow, Audrey, and longtime secretary and friend, Claudia Prescott, went through the box and found the nearly complete manuscript, along with other unpublished work. 

Cathy Goldsmith, the vice president and associate publishing director at Random House’s children’s publishing division, said in a statement that the book seems to have been written between 1958 and 1962, given that the brother and sister are the same as those in “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,” which was published in 1960.

Are there ethical questions at play here? Probably. Theodore Geisel, who wrote as Dr. Seuss, was a notorious perfectionist. It’s quite possible this is a work he did not think was up to snuff, else why not submit it to his publisher himself? Though when he died in 1991, Geisel had left no specific instructions regarding the fate of What Pet Should I Get, we can’t help but be reminded of the debate which sprung up prior to the publication of the Nabokov novel that was ultimately published as The Original of Laura in 2008.

Whatever the case, a brand new Dr. Seuss book will be published in July, the first one since Oh, the Places You’ll Go! came out in 1990, the year before the author’s death.