Lost Dr. Seuss Stories Come to Life Today

"The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories" offers a rare glimpse into the early years of acclaimed La Jolla children’s author Theodor Seuss Geisel.

By Angela Babb Timmons

Dr. Seuss fans are in store for a neat treat—seven of his original tales never before published in book format have just been released in a 72-page collection.

Just as you’d expect from the Dr. Seuss we know and love, The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will introduce a whole new world of whimsical characters navigating some pretty zany situations. Get ready to meet a duck named McKluck, a goldfish named Gustav, tiny twins Tadd and Todd, and many other characters reminiscent of the beloved author’s most memorable works.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a rare look at Dr. Seuss before he was a household name. According to children’s book publisher Random House, “It’s the literary equivalent of buried treasure.” A treasure indeed, considering these stories last appeared over 60 years ago when they were published in Redbook magazine.

Rewind to early 1950s when a virtually unknown writer by the name of Theodor Seuss Geisel lived in La Jolla with his wife, Audrey. He had a successful career in advertising, but found time to pen tall tales and fanciful stories that he submitted to magazines for publication. During 1950 and 1951, nearly a dozen of his original stories and illustrations appeared in Redbook. Less than 10 years later he published The Cat in the Hat and his magazine days came to an end.

Turns out these stories from his early years were never truly “lost,” just rarely seen and long forgotten.

“This is exciting for fans who have known Seuss throughout their whole life,” Susan Brandt, president of license and marketing at Dr. Seuss Enterprises in La Jolla, told Fox 5 San Diego. “But also, how neat to share with our children new stories that we can discover together.”

The author lived and worked in LaJolla until his death in 1991.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will include illustrations by Dr. Seuss that appeared in Redbook, with enhancements made to the size and color in a manner that maintains the integrity of the author’s original work.

Not only does the legacy of Dr. Seuss carry on in the many books he published during his lifetime, but his name lives on at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego in honor of the significant contributions made by the author and his wife.

Audrey Geisel continues to play a prominent role in the La Jolla community through her many philanthropic efforts. Most recently she was honored at the 2011 Globe Gala in recognition of the generosity and support she has given to the theatre.

“She has worked to extend Seuss’s moral and artistic influence through the Dr. Seuss Foundation, which provides primary support for over 100 medical, cultural, and socially active institutions,” as noted on the website of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

So what exactly is a Bippolo seed, you might ask? If Dr. Seuss were here today he might turn to you and say: Go get the book. Cuddle up in a cozy nook. Flip through the pages and take a look.

National Punctuation Day Is Here!

National Punctuation Day is a great day to celebrate commas and apostrophes and all those oher funny marks!



Feeling uneasy about mystery quotation marks?

We have "fresh" sandwiches.

Badgered by errant apostrophes?

Our employee's are at you're service.

Confused by AWOL commas?

Smoking pets and bicycles prohibited.

Stop worrying about whether your dog smokes and start worrying about punctuation. Today would be a good day to start: It's National Punctuation Day.

I despair for humanity when I open an e-mail that bristles with so many exclamation points I can hardly make out the words in between them. And those are just the press releases about library events.

Two yearsago, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten declared the English language dead, the coup de grace delivered by an unnecessary apostrophe.

But don't bury English yet. People are fighting to revive its proper use. National Punctuation Day was the brainchild of Jeff Rubin, a California newsletter writer who founded it in 2004 as "a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis."

Rubin and his wife, Norma, maintain a website, national punctuationday.com. In 2009 they sponsored a punctuation baking contest. (Question mark meat loaf, anyone?) last year they posted punctuation-themed haikus:

Exclamation points

And question marks together?

Only in comics.

Then there is Jeff Deck's mission to bring America back to perfect punctuation, at least in public. "It's a question of people building their apostrophic confidence," says Deck, co-author of The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time.

Deck, 30, an editor who lives in New Hampshire, has a hands-on approach to raising awareness of poor punctuation. A couple of years ago he and his friend Benjamin Herson, a bookseller, set off on a 2½-month road trip in search of errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar in public signs.

Armed with their own heroic typo correction kit (Sharpies, chalk, Wite-Out and more), they found 437 errors and corrected 236. (They were charged with vandalism only once.)

The most common punctuation error? "The poor apostrophe is the most misused and put-upon. People are always throwing it into words where it's not needed, especially plurals," Deck says, citing signs directing people to "Restroom's" and offering "Apple's for sale."

"Almost as common is the apostrophe being left out where it's needed. In Cleveland we saw a big banner that said, 'Lets go Cavaliers.'" And don't get him started on "its" and "it's."

Deck doesn't blame vanishing punctuation skills on e-mail and texting, saying those modes of communication "get a bad rap. It's very easy to blame them."

Mary Alice Lopez isn't so sure. Lopez, 45, teaches sixth-grade language arts to about 60 students at the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa.

Parochial schools and their formidable nuns were once a bastion of proper punctuation: Learn it or regret it. Nuns are scarce these days, but Lopez says grammar is still emphasized — though harder to teach. Students "all have cell phones, and that means punctuation and capitalization are out the window with texting. It's had a very negative impact."

Teaching punctuation begins in kindergarten. Her sixth-graders struggle most with commas: "They either omit them completely or put way too many in."

One teaching method the kids enjoy is a version of Deck's quest. She assigns them to find errors in signs and printed texts. "It's fun for them, but it also stresses how meanings can change if you make an error."

Roy Peter Clark loves punctuation so much that the cover of his new book, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, features a giant golden semicolon. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg devotes several chapters to punctuation, emphasizing what a valuable tool it can be.

Nostradamus vs Verne

It is almost Saturday! What awaits?

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Many folks seem to be enamored with Nostradamus as a prophet or "foreteller" of future events. To me his writings are too vague and open to too many different interpretations. I prefer to think of Jules Verne.

When I think of Jules Verne, I think of the genius behind "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (my personal favorite of only because I read it first, at an impressionable age, and it got me on a sci-fi kick). In these stories, as well as others like "Around the World in Eighty Days" Verne, brilliantly prescient, wrote about flying, space and underwater travel and so much more long before any of it was actually possible.

But his ability to foretell the future, especially with regard to technology, which he viewed with a good dose of skepticism and fear, is best seen in his relatively unknown novel, "Paris in the Twentieth Century". First, the fascinating story behind the publication of the book…

Verne wrote the book in 1863, the year before he started publishing Journey to the Center of the Earth. He showed the manuscript to his publisher, who read it over and scribbled “Wait twenty years to write this book,” in the margins. “Nobody today will believe your prophecy, nobody will care about it.” Verne followed Hetzel’s advice and the manuscript was dropped into a safe where it lay until 1989 (no, it’s not a typo!) when it was discovered by Verne’s great-grandson.

After much hype, the novel was finally published in 1994. The story is set in 1960, nearly 100 years in the future from when Verne penned it. He got so much right about the future, it’s sort of scary. But the coolest part was that Paris in the 1960s would need another decade before actually catching up to Verne on some of his predictions. The book describes a city where people communicate via a worldwide telegraphic communications network (fax machines? Internet?)—where people commute to work in gasoline-powered automobiles and high-speed trains. He predicted that reading would decline, computers would rule our lives, people would live in skyscrapers and that criminals would be sent to their deaths “by electric charge.” Pretty interesting I'd say.

As a novel, the book is lackluster in just about every way imaginable. So don’t read it looking for an amazing story/plot like with his classics.

PS - He also predicted that a manned moon mission would be launched from Central Florida.

A Marginal Note On Mark Twain

Twain House Dining Room

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Coming in one week! The answer!


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Curatorial Staff Makes A Mark Twain Discovery


Margin Notes Written By The Author Are Stuff Of Literary Study


By MARK SPENCER, mspencer@courant.com The Hartford Courant

10:29 p.m. EDT, September 3, 2011

HARTFORD ——

Anyone who saw the two women on their hands and knees in the library of the Mark Twain House in March might have thought they were cleaning.

Chief curator Patti Philippon and curatorial associate Mallory Howard were, in fact, doing a bit of dusting. The two women are the Twain museum's entire curatorial staff, and when it comes to passing menial tasks down the chain, they run out of links fast.

But their primary mission was to inventory the books in the library of the Victorian Gothic house on Farmington Avenue where Samuel Clemens, who published as Mark Twain, and his family lived from 1874 to 1891.

As volunteer tour guides patiently explain to the 70,000 people who visit the home each year, the books in the ornate library are of Clemens' era and interests, but are not actually the valuable editions he owned or had personally read.

"That turned out not to be the case," said Howard.

As they rummaged through the stand-in books, Howard and Philippon were stunned to find a long unaccounted-for book that had in fact been owned, or at least read, by Clemens. The book had appeared on previous inventories so the staff knew it existed, but as in many American homes, they didn't exactly know where it was.

"It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen very often and when it does it's just amazing," Philippon said.

While the two women were thrilled to find the book, Howard hit the literary jackpot when she later examined the copy of "Boat Life In Egypt and Nubia," a travel book by William C. Prime that Clemens detested.

There in the margins of many pages were scribbled notes, often acerbic or sarcastic, that Howard was almost certain had been written by Clemens as he read the book more than a century ago.

While perhaps mundane to most people, the discovery is the kind of thing that quickens the pulse of literary types. Appropriately called marginalia, scholars study it to get a glimpse into the thoughts of great writers.

"These are his own off-the-cuff, unedited thoughts," Philippon said. "It gives people an insight into him and what he really thought."

"Boat Life" occupies a unique niche in both Clemens' career and his relationship with Hartford. Twain's "Innocents Abroad," published in 1869, is his humorous account of a boat trip he took two years before through Europe and the Middle East.

It was his biggest-selling book during his lifetime and brought him to Hartford for the first time, where his publisher was based. And he devoted an entire chapter to savagely satirizing Prime and his book. Scholars have lusted to see Clemens' copy.

They will not be disappointed. After one overwrought passage, Clemens wrote, "This person was drunk."

Howard is intimately familiar with Clemens marginalia. She had worked as a tour guide and intern at the Mark Twain House & Museum before being hired after graduating last year with a bachelor's degree in American history from Central Connecticut State University.

As an intern, Howard was assigned the task of reviewing a collection of about 300 Clemens-owned books it acquired in the mid-1990s and for the first time cataloging the marginalia. Howard knows that most people would find it tedious going through thousands of pages in hundred of books searching for every pencil stroke and deciphering nearly illegible comments.

But she is the kind of person who can, unprompted, interrupt a conversation with a wistful, "Oh, I love marginalia," and said she couldn't wait to get started.

"I do geek out," Howard said. "This project was perfect for me."

To confirm the "Boat Life" find, scans of the marginalia were sent to Twain experts around the country.

Alan Gribben, a Twain library and marginalia expert at Auburn University in Montgomery, Ala., responded simply, "Wow."

From Your Nautical Side

Another hint...or what?

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The Nautical Roots of 9 Common Phrases

The Vikings, Columbus, the Pilgrims … they all arrived here by ship. So it stands to reason that some of the phrases we use today were born on the high seas. While sources differ on the roots of many sayings, others have a clear path to the days of sailing across the ocean. Here’s a look at 9 family-friendly phrases that likely came from the mouths of sailors.


1. Clean Bill of Health


The “Age of Sail” in the 18th and early 19th centuries was a glorious time in naval history marked by many epic battles on the high seas, but it was also a time of widespread disease. In order to receive permission to dock at a foreign port, ships were often required to show a bill of health—a document that stated the medical condition of their previous port of call, as well as that of everyone aboard. A “clean bill of health” certified that the crew and their previous port were free from the plague, cholera and other epidemics. Today, a person with a “clean bill of health” has passed a doctor’s physical or other medical examination.


2. In the Doldrums


During the Age of Sail, “The Doldrums” were stretches of ocean north and south of the equator that were infamous for their light winds. If a vessel was caught there, it could languish for days or even weeks waiting for the wind to pick up, which made for a very bored crew. Eventually, The Doldrums became so well known that the name was applied to any area with light winds. Today, someone who is “in the doldrums” is either listless or depressed.


3. Three Sheets to the Wind


Many people are surprised to learn that this expression for drunkenness was born on the high seas. “Sheet” is the nautical term for the rope that controls the tension on a square sail. If the sheets are loose on a three-masted ship, then the sails will flap uselessly in the wind, and the ship will drift out of control until the situation is corrected. Thus, the modern phrase “three sheets to the wind” has come to signify a person who is intoxicated to the point of being out of control.


4. Filibuster


The roots of the term “filibuster” can be traced to the pirates who prowled the shipping trade routes in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The Dutch word for pirate was vrijbuiter—a word that eventually led to the French term flibustier and the Spanish term filibustero. The British, however, pronounced it filibuster.

So how did the word for pirate became associated with obstructionist political tactics? It’s still a bit of a mystery, but some historians speculate that, since pirates were an incessant, obstructing nuisance, they effectively blocked trade in many areas, just as politicians try to block legislation today.

5. Chew the Fat


Before refrigeration, salted beef and pork were staple foods aboard sailing vessels because they could be stored for long periods without spoiling. However, they were also tough and extremely difficult to eat. It often took a great deal of chewing just to soften up the meat and make it edible, which took a lot of time. So, in the spirit of multi-tasking, men would gather to discuss the day’s events while they chewed their fatty, salt-cured meat. According to this theory, whenever people get together to gossip or chat, we say that they are “chewing the fat.”


6. Slush Fund


Most people think this term originated in the smoke-filled boardrooms of corporate America. Surprisingly, however, it can be traced back to some clever ship cooks who saved the slushy mix of fat and grease that was left over after every meal.
The slush would be stowed away in a secret hiding place until the ship returned to port. The cooks would then sell the fat to candle makers and other merchants, earning themselves a tidy sum in the process. Thus, the term “slush fund” refers to an illicit cash reserve.


7. By and Large



A sailing vessel was considered seaworthy if it could sail both “by” (into the wind) and “large” (with the wind). This term has come to mean “generally speaking” in modern parlance.


8. Groggy



Along with salted beef and water, the British Royal Navy issued sailors a daily ration of rum to keep them happy during long months at sea. And, not surprisingly, the men would often save up several days’ worth of their rations before consuming it in one long binge, which frequently resulted in insubordination. In 1740, hoping to reduce the number of alcohol-fueled discipline problems, British Admiral Edward Vernon ordered all vessels to dilute their daily rum ration with water. Vernon was known as “Old Grog” because he always wore a coat made out of grogram, a coarse material that was stiffened with gum. Consequently, the diluted rum drink that he created became known as grog, and sailors who drank too much of it were said to feel “groggy.” Today, people who are overly tired, lightheaded or generally inebriated are still referred to as groggy.


9. Under the Weather


Keeping watch onboard sailing ships was a boring and tedious job, but the worst watch station was on the “weather” (windward) side of the bow. The sailor who was assigned to this station was subject to the constant pitching and rolling of the ship. By the end of his watch, he would be soaked from the waves crashing over the bow. A sailor who was assigned to this unpleasant duty was said to be “under the weather.” Sometimes, these men fell ill and died as a result of the assignment, which is why today “under the weather” is used to refer to someone suffering from an illness. A related theory claims that ill sailors were sent below deck (or “under the weather”) if they were feeling sick.

Why Do The Brits Hate Us?

50 Most Annoying Americanisms

Why do they hate us (U.S. citizens)?

The most common answer has always been that they hate our freedom, but I have breaking news from across the pond: It might be because of our language.

The BBC recently posted an article on the 50 most noted (a polite British way of saying annoying) Americanisms.

Dare I say that I must be British at heart since they make many excellent points, including:

Reach out instead of “ask.”

It is what it is, which is what it is: a phrase that says NOTHING.

Where’s it at? instead of the grammatically correct “Where is it?”

Ridiculousity, which the contributor hopes is being done tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn’t bet on that–based on how often I hear the next one.

Physicality, which isn’t a word despite its growing use. (Note: People in the U.S. love to make up -ality words since it makes them sound so smart, at least to those who think anything ever uttered instantly becomes an acceptable word.)

Least worst option; the contributor suggests asking what the “most best option” might be.

Going forward instead of the standard “in the future.”


I could go on, but I don’t want anyone to get his knickers in a bunch.


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What is with the Peanuts cartoons? A hint of something coming soon, perhaps?

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Psssst - The answer to the question posed a while back is - William Wordsworth. Your parting gifts are in the mail...

Is America Misnomer of a Moniker?

I don’t get it. Why are the terms United States and America used interchangeably?

The United States is part of America, which is why it’s called the United States of America! It is not America any more than France is Europe, Sudan is Africa, Chile is America, or Australia is Australia. Oh wait, scratch that last one.

America is split into two continents, North America and South America, and the two continents are divided into separate nations, one of which is called United States.

America and United States are not interchangeable.

I know. I know. I can almost hear the descriptivists out there, typing fervently on their keyboards:

Well, Paul Revere first referred to the United States as America in 1751, and famous author William Cullen Bryant often referred to the United States as America. Usage gained even more popularity in the 20th century. Therefore, its use is completely acceptable.

Yeah, yeah. It’s not always about usage. Sometimes, it’s about clarity, and it doesn’t make sense to refer to one nation on a continent (or, in this case, two continents) as the continent itself.

It almost makes me want to move to America, I mean Canada.

Two Niggling Questions Answered By OED

Between you and me or you and I?

A common mistake in spoken English is to say ‘between you and I’, as in this sentence:

X It’s a tiny bit boring, between you and I.

In standard English, it’s grammatically correct to say ‘between you and me’ and incorrect to say ‘between you and I’. The reason for this is that a preposition such as between should be followed by an objective pronoun (such as me, him, her, and us) rather than a subjective pronoun (such as I, he, she, and we). Saying ‘between you and I’ is grammatically equivalent to saying ‘between him and she’, or ‘between we’, which are both clearly wrong.

People make this mistake because they know it’s not correct to say, for example, ‘John and me went to the shops’. They know that the correct sentence would be ‘John and I went to the shops’. But they then mistakenly assume that the words ‘and me’ should be replaced by ‘and I’ in all cases.

Remember: the correct expression is ‘between you and me’:

√ It’s a tiny bit boring, between you and me.



Bored by, of, or with?

Which of these expressions should you use: is one of them less acceptable than the others?
Do you ever get bored with eating out all the time?

Delegates were bored by the lectures.

He grew bored of his day job.

The first two constructions, bored with and bored by, are the standard ones. The third, bored of, is more recent than the other two and it’s become extremely common. In fact, the Oxford English Corpus contains almost twice as many instances of bored of than bored by. It represents a perfectly logical development of the language, and was probably formed on the pattern of expressions such as tired of or weary of. Nevertheless, some people dislike it and it’s not fully accepted in standard English. It’s best to avoid using it in formal writing.


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On this day in 1802, (Insert your guess here)completed the sonnet, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," one of his best known short poems.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!