![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In the fiscal year ending ApBeginner Books had a sales volume far exceeding a million dollars. He had begun to have dreams of empire, he was readying Random House for a merger with some major communications company, and he wanted Beginner Books and its top line tucked neatly inside. He had marveled at the spiraling profits of the Beginner Books and finally could no longer endure being merely lender and distributor. The bizarre agreement between the two publishers to share Ted continued through The Cat in the Hat Comes Back and an educational edition of Yertle the Turtle, until finally Houghton Mifflin sold its rights to Random House. Thousands (of Random’s trade edition] went into schools through jobbers … Random was making more money from this that we were, very rarely in reports of Beginner Books was there any mention of Houghton Mifflin or of Bill Spalding.” Bennett Cerf had lent his author to Houghton Mifflin and then ran away with the book. As Houghton Mifflin’s Richard Gladstone, assigned to market The Cat to schools, recalls: “The reader was essentially a Houghton Mifflin project, but we never knew how many we sold. … Though The Cat in the Hat occupied a triumphant niche in juvenile publishing, William Spalding, the man who had suggested the venture, receded into the blackground. … Random House soon estimated that it had become the largest publisher of children’s books in America. Helen remembered the astonishing journeymen writers who discovered that they simply could not create a book using only two or three hundred words. From his office downstairs, Bennett Cerf looked with awe on the casual launching of this series of children’s readers, soon calling it the “most profitable single publishing entity ever created.” Phillis talked of merging Ted’s “happy genius” with the prosaic but precise science vocabulary word lists. For the instigator William Spalding who remained an outsider, it was an assault on illiteracy. But everyone involved tended to explain the adventure from a different perspective. The management was cozy, absorbed and united in creating an innovative way of blending words and illustrations to teach reading. Ted and Phyllis agreed to undertake printing of about sixty thousand copies of each Beginner Book. The new company borrowed two hundred thousand dollars from Random House and began to sign contract authors and artists. … For Beginner Books, these were the honeymoon months. Let me quote some more, “Phillis Cerf had been researching every primer in print, cross-matching word lists until she came up with 379 words from which their contract authors could chose 200, plus twenty easy-to-pronounce “emergency words” for each book. We know why Spalding was noticing “growing illiteracy.” Geisel: A Biography by Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan. William Spalding, author of the Macmillan look-and-say reading series, was “zealous in his conviction that a new lively kind of primer could arrest the growing illiteracy among children.” I guess, Sam, since look-and-say wasn’t working, they thought they would figure out a better way to do look-and-and-say: Pour more gas on the fire to put it out. Spaulding studied under Wilhelm Wundt in Germany. Spaulding, author of the popular 1907 Aldine reading series and the Yale Dean of Education! Frank E. William Spalding of Macmillan publishing was the son of Frank E. Seuss’ Sight-Vocabulary Readers by Donald L. ![]()
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