Oh, the places you’ll go if you want a Dr. Seuss book.
In light of newfound censorship of the children’s author, some are flocking to eBay, and many purchasers are willing to dole out thousands of dollars to get their hands on what may be the last copies of some of Dr. Seuss’s famous books.
Following the announcement that Dr. Seuss Enterprises would stop publishing six of his titles due to claims of racist imagery, owners of the books are scoring potentially big sales on online retailers such as eBay and Amazon.
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One of the books, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, is going for $20,000 on the retailer’s site, with “BANNED” written in the product’s title on the website. That copy had received more than 2,200 views per hour.
A copy of Scrambled Eggs Super! is selling for $5,000 and has garnered more than 400 views per hour.
Along with those two titles, the other soon-to-be-banned books include If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, and The Cat’s Quizzer.
On Beyond Zebra! was going for hundreds of dollars, as well as The Cat’s Quizzer. One seller that had a copy of four of the scorned books is selling a collection for $2,000.
On Amazon, Scrambled Eggs Super! was listed as a bestseller, and used sellers are going for more than $900 for their copies. The other targeted titles ranged between $700 to nearly $1,000 for a used copy.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that preserves Theodor Seuss “Ted” Geisel’s legacy, said they worked with a panel of experts and educators in making the decision to nix those six titles, citing that the portrayals of some of the characters are “hurtful and wrong.”
Some of the public scrutiny includes an illustration in Mulberry Street of an Asian man holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice, with text that notes the character as a “Chinaman who eats with sticks.”
In If I Ran the Zoo, characters from Africa are portrayed to look like monkeys, while another image presents an Arab man riding a camel. The book also describes Africans as “potbellied” and “thick-lipped” and Asian characters as “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell,” according to a paper published in the academic journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature. The paper says Seuss perpetuated themes of white supremacy.
The controversy over Seuss’s works has come to a head on Read Across America Day, a children’s reading initiative backed by the National Educational Association celebrated in honor of Seuss’s birthday on March 2.
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President Biden did not mention Seuss in his proclamation for the day, unlike former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who invoked the author’s name to celebrate the initiative.
Seuss remains one of the most popular and bestselling children’s authors, even three decades after his death in 1991.
