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These limitations could be frustrating - Seuss loved to tell an almost-certainly embellished story about the long gestation process of the first Beginner Book, The Cat in the Hat. It’s a perfect setup for a classic Seuss bestiary, but the various household critters are all minor variations on a few templates, less unique or imaginative than any of the nameless “things” that “go to the right” in Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

He almost seems bored with some of these projects, like the previous year’s There’s a Wocket in My Pocket. The art and stories had to be simpler to appeal to these small readers - most Beginner Book illustrations don’t have Seuss’s trademark byzantine backgrounds, or any at all, just blank voids - and their small hands meant he had to work on a smaller canvas. Wyeth or Chris Van Allsburg, but they had a rich, fluid line that became flatter and shakier as Seuss’s career went on.Īnd while his Beginner Books gave him his greatest success, they rarely inspired his best work. His illustrations were never as technically accomplished or lusciously detailed as peers like N.C. Age was clearly beginning to take a toll on his art.

By 1975, Seuss was entering his seventies (he was born almost at the beginning of the century, which is nice when you want to calculate how old he was at any given time). It’s easy to forget this since he hit the peak of his popularity in the ‘50s, but as Charles Cohen points out in his essential biography The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss, that marks the exact midpoint of his career. Seuss himself, and it seems to have given him new life.

Seuss will get the kids started, and now they can follow on from there.īut the title challenge is really to Dr. (I’m sure that’s exactly the language he’d use if he were here now.) It’s like an instruction manual to imagining: Dr. Seuss book, but here he comes out and says it, encouraging his large audience of small people to think of the craziest shit they can. Seuss thought was cool,” a celebration of the imagination. There’s no story or characters here, but there’s a thematic connection beyond “stuff Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book or On Beyond Zebra! that set up a loose plot that’s really just an excuse for Seuss to draw up another cabinet of curiosities.

Seuss books like One Fish, Two Fish or Hop on Pop that are just one darned thing after another connected only by the occasional returning phrase or character, and those others like Dr. Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! is somewhere in between those Dr. It sounds like a celebratory exclamation, and also like a challenge. There it is, right there on the cover before you can even open the book. Someone once told me the very beginning is a very good place to start, and you can’t start any earlier with Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! than the title.