"All Sorts of Sports," a never-published "lost" work by Theodore Geisel has been discovered and will be sold at auction this week. Some will be surprised to discover that Geisel used assistants even in the earliest stages of creating and writing his books.
[The manuscript] consists of nineteen handwritten and drawn pages, the first seven of which are completely in the hand of Dr. Seuss. The remaining pages are mostly written by an assistant with corrections and doodles by Dr. Seuss, some taped on.
At the link are seven pages from the manuscript, and an example of the rough draft of the text:
"All Sorts of Sports. Shall I play checkers? golf? croquet? There are so many games there are to play. I could. / maybe.. / shall I.. There are so many many sorts. So many sorts of games + sports. What am I going to do today? There are so many games to play! I guess I won't... There are so many sports, let's see... I could bowl, jump hurdles, or water ski. I could blumf. Or blumf blumf blumf blumf blumf. Or blumf. Or blumf blumf blumf blumf blumf."
The manuscript is up for bids at Nate B. Sanders Auctions; the auction ends October 21, and the current bid is a bit over $21K.
Link, via Metafilter.
Still love the books, no matter what.