Please Try to Remember the First of Octember!

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Overview

Question: What do you get the kid who wants everything? Answer: Please Try to Remember the First of Octember!, the wonderfully exaggerated LeSeig Beginner Book that gently pokes fun at the green-eyed monster in all of us. Reissued with a new cover taken from the interior, this backlist classic is a parent's wish come true!

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780394835631
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Publication date: 10/28/1977
Edition description: REISSUE
Pages: 41
Sales rank: 81,916
Age range: 5 - 8 Years
Series: Beginner Books(R) Series
Product dimensions: 6.77 (w) x 9.32 (h) x 0.42 (d)

Meet the Author

Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, 1904. After attending Dartmouth College and Oxford University, he began a career in advertising. His advertising cartoons, featuring Quick, Henry, the Flit!, appeared in several leading American magazines. Dr. Seuss's first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, hit the market in 1937, and the world of children's literature was changed forever! In 1957, Seuss's The Cat in the Hat became the prototype for one of Random House's best-selling series, Beginner Books. This popular series combined engaging stories with outrageous illustrations and playful sounds to teach basic reading skills. Brilliant, playful, and always respectful of children, Dr. Seuss charmed his way into the consciousness of four generations of youngsters and parents. In the process, he helped kids learn to read.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and three Academy Awards, Seuss was the author and illustrator of 44 children's books, some of which have been made into audiocassettes, animated television specials, and videos for children of all ages. Even after his death in 1991, Dr. Seuss continues to be the best-selling author of children's books in the world.

Biography

Now that generations of readers have been reared on The Cat in the Hat and Fox in Socks, it's easy to forget how colorless most children's books were before Dr. Seuss reinvented the genre. When the editorial cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1936, the book was turned down by 27 publishers, many of whom said it was "too different." Geisel was about to burn his manuscript when it was rescued and published, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, by a college classmate.

Over the next two decades, Geisel concocted such delightfully loopy tales as The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Horton Hears a Who. Most of his books earned excellent reviews, and three received Caldecott Honor Awards. But it was the 1957 publication of The Cat in the Hat that catapulted Geisel to celebrity.

Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read, along with a related Life magazine article, had recently charged that children's primers were too pallid and bland to inspire an interest in reading. The Cat in the Hat, written with 220 words from a first-grade vocabulary list, "worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane and Spot," as Ellen Goodman wrote in The Detroit Free Press. With its vivid illustrations, rhyming text and topsy-turvy plot, Geisel's book for beginning readers was anything but bland. It sold nearly a million copies within three years.

Geisel was named president of Beginner Books, a new venture of Random House, where he worked with writers and artists like P.D. Eastman, Michael Frith, Al Perkins, and Roy McKie, some of whom collaborated with him on book projects. For books he wrote but didn't illustrate, Geisel used the pen name Theo LeSieg (LeSieg is Geisel spelled backwards).

As Dr. Seuss, he continued to write bestsellers. Some, like Green Eggs and Ham and the tongue-twisting Fox in Socks, were aimed at beginning readers. Others could be read by older children or read aloud by parents, who were often as captivated as their kids by Geisel's wit and imagination. Geisel's visual style appealed to television and film directors, too: The animator Chuck Jones, who had worked with Geisel on a series of Army training films, brought How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to life as a hugely popular animated TV special in 1966. A live-action movie starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch was released in 2000.

Many Dr. Seuss stories have serious undertones: The Butter Battle Book, for example, parodies the nuclear arms race. But whether he was teaching vocabulary words or values, Geisel never wrote plodding lesson books. All his stories are animated by a lively sense of visual and verbal play. At the time of his death in 1991, his books had sold more than 200 million copies. Bennett Cerf, Geisel's publisher, liked to say that of all the distinguished authors he had worked with, only one was a genius: Dr. Seuss.

Good To Know

The Cat in the Hat was written at the urging of editor William Spaulding, who insisted that a book for first-graders should have no more than 225 words. Later, Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write a book with just 50 words. Geisel won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, though to his recollection, Cerf never paid him the $50.

Geisel faced another challenge in 1974, when his friend Art Buchwald dared him to write a political book. Geisel picked up a copy of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! and a pen, crossed out each mention of the name "Marvin K. Mooney," and replaced it with "Richard M. Nixon." Buchwald reprinted the results in his syndicated column. Nine days later, President Nixon announced his resignation.

The American Heritage Dictionary says the word "nerd" first appeared in print in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo / A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!" The word "grinch," after the title character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as a killjoy or spoilsport.

1. Also Known As:
  
  Theodor Seuss Geisel (full name); also: Theo LeSieg, Rosetta Stone
1. Date of Birth:
  
  March 2, 1904
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Springfield, Massachusetts
1. Date of Death:
  
  September 4, 1991
2. Place of Death:
  
  La Jolla, California

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Ken-in-Kindergarten

Posted February 6, 2010

I Also Recommend:

Need a book for teaching about Months of the Year in Elementary School?

A student brought me in a library copy of this book. I found it to be excellent for an introduction into a lesson on the months of the year in Kindergarten. It is a fun read, and can be used for a writing project after reading it to the class. They then can write about what they would like on the First of Octember. I even used this book for a gift for a teacher in Elementary school. Enjoy.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted August 3, 2009

Cute story.

My son loves this book.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted March 13, 2006

Please Try to Remember the Fun to be had With Seuss!

This is a wonderful book for children young and old. A great way to teach young children rhyming words. It is an even better way for 'older' children to remember that it is okay to wish for time to be silly and not grown up. I was read this book when I was a child and now that I teach preschool, could not wait to share it with my students!
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Please Try to Remember the First of Octember!

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Need a book for teaching about Months of the Year in Elementary School?

Cute story.

Please Try to Remember the Fun to be had With Seuss!