Lost stories by Dr. Seuss to be published

Seven rarely seen Dr. Seuss stories will be published in a book this fall.

Random House will release The Bippolo Seed and other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss on Sept. 27, the company announced on its Facebook page.

The publisher described the tales as "the literary equivalent of buried treasure."

The stories were discovered in old 1950s magazines by a Massachusetts dentist and avid fan of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel. He wrote them at the same time he penned classics such as The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

The stories in The Bippolo Seed include Gustav the Goldfish, an early, rhymed version of A Fish Out of Water and  The Strange Shirt Spot, which is similar to the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The title story features a cat who leads an innocent duck to make a bad decision.

"The stories are as good as anything in the already-published canon and readers of all ages are in for a treat," said Random House vice-president Kate Klimo.

Online discovery

Geisel's art director Cathy Goldsmith stumbled across the stories — featured on tear sheets from 1950s magazines posted in an eBay auction — 10 years ago.

She contacted the seller, dentist Charles Cohen of Springfield, Mass., who turned out to be an avid Dr. Seuss scholar and collector. Goldsmith then introduced him to Klimo. 

Cohen is author of 2003's The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel.  He had long wanted to compile the lost stories he had collected, according to the Guardian newspaper.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will include an introduction by Cohen.

Dr. Seuss made his name with 1957's The Cat in the Hat and published 44 books designed to engage young readers with rhyme and wacky humour. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing and died in 1991.