The Dr. Seuss Empire Is Only Getting Bigger After Discontinued Books Send Sales Soaring

On Tuesday morning, Seuss Enterprises, which handles the estate of Dr. Seuss, announced that it would discontinue six of its less popular titles due to racist imagery. None of the books—If I Ran the Zoo, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer—are Seuss bestsellers, and few thought the announcement would set off a culture war. But it did—and drove a stampede of buyers to booksellers. After all, if Dr. Seuss, who passed away in 1991, could earn $33 million last year, why shouldn’t shrewd collectors and Seuss lovers act like Horton and hatch a nest egg?

A day after the announcement of the cancellation, nine of the top 10 books on Amazon’s best-selling charts were by Dr. Seuss, though none were the six controversial titles. Those books are now much harder to get, and their prices on the secondary market have skyrocketed. On rare book site AbeBooks, first editions of And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street are going for up to $9,000, while If I Ran the Zoo is selling for $8,200. On Barnes & Noble, both titles are already out of stock. Rare and children’s bookstores, which typically get calls about The Cat in the Hat or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, have been handling increased requests for the six nixed titles.

“Fielding those calls was basically our entire day yesterday,” says Marissa Acey, a manager at New York City’s Book Culture. The store only had one copy of If I Ran the Zoo, she added, explaining that none of the titles listed were popular enough to keep in stock.

“We spent the whole day yesterday on the phone answering calls about Dr. Seuss,” adds Peter Glassman, the owner of New York City’s fabled children’s bookstore Books of Wonder. A lover of Dr. Seuss who contributed to the Your Favorite Seuss compilation, Glassman hopes the six books can be edited to remove the objectionable characters and illustrations. “Having met Ted [Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss], I think he would’ve been the first to say, ‘Just change it!’ … If these stories can be kept alive in a way that is not offensive, that would be wonderful.”

The surprising announcement by Seuss Enterprises followed a 2019 study by the Conscious Kid’s Library and the University of California-San Diego that found themes of orientalism and anti-Blackness in some of his books, and coincided with President Joe Biden excluding Seuss’ name from his Proclamation on Read Across America Day. Across conservative media, the titles were the latest victims of “cancel culture,” with Newsmax and Fox News hosts spending significant airtime on the matter. 

What they didn’t acknowledge is that these six books make up only a sliver of the Seuss library—and the money-making machine that that library has become. Seuss Enterprises earned a record $33 million before taxes in 2020, up from just $9.5 million five years earlier—thanks to a flurry of lucrative Hollywood deals, including Netflix.

“We put our big boy pants on,” Seuss Enterprises president Susan Brandt told Forbes last year, referring to the company’s business strategy. 

Brandt brought Seuss to Netflix, which turned the classic 50-word Green Eggs and Ham into a big-budget animated series. Season Two is currently in production there. That helped lead to a deal with Warner Bros. Pictures to make two films based on The Cat in the Hat and a third based on Oh, the Places You’ll Go!. (All three of the titles are among the top 10 bestsellers on Amazon today). All of the TV and movie projects are still a go, despite The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! being cited in the study as transmitting racist imagery, including the use of blackface stereotypes. A Black elevator operator working in Geisel’s office in the 1950s was even the inspiration for his iconic Cat character. Seuss Enterprises declined to comment on these books.

Presumably that’s the real reason why Seuss Enterprises preemptively self-canceled the books—to protect its other valuable intellectual property. After all, the company will collect seven-figure checks for the rights to use the source material in the films, plus bonuses depending on box-office performance Seuss has also taken live entertainment by storm: Once the world opens up again, the traveling Dr. Seuss exhibit will continue. During its five-month run in Toronto pre-pandemic, the show sold 175,000 tickets and $1 million in merchandise.

As for the soaring sales of his titles? Book sales made up more than $16 million of Seuss’ earnings last year. Even with six fewer titles in his catalog in 2021, expect that number to grow bigger than the Grinch’s heart.