If I Ran the Zoo.
SEUSS, Dr. [Theodor Geisel].
If I Ran the Zoo.
Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo
New York: Random House, 1950.
$250.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152131
First edition, early printing of Dr. Seuss’s Caldecott Honor book, a beloved tale of a boy’s outlandish imaginary menagerie, the work that introduced the word “nerd” into the English language. Quarto, original pictorial boards, pictorial endpapers, illustrated by the author, with the Redbook Magazine reference on the copyright page and 295/295 price on the dust jacket. Very good in a good dust jacket with a tape repair to the front panel.
Published in 1950, If I Ran the Zoo stands among Theodor Seuss Geisel's most inventive early works, marking the period in which the author refined the anapestic verse and exuberant nonsense vocabulary that would define his mature style. The narrative follows young Gerald McGrew, who, dissatisfied with the conventional animals of the local zoo, envisions populating it instead with a fantastical array of invented creatures gathered from impossibly remote corners of the globe. The book is notable as the first printed source to record the word "nerd," which appears as the name of one of McGrew's imagined animals, a coinage that would soon migrate into common usage and acquire a meaning entirely divorced from its origin. As with much of Geisel's output from this decade, the work celebrates the boundlessness of childhood imagination while showcasing his distinctive draftsmanship, the elaborate machinery, improbable beasts, and teetering architectural forms rendered with the confident line that became his signature. If I Ran the Zoo was a finalist for the Caldecott Medal, and it remains a touchstone of mid-twentieth-century American children's literature, though, like several of Geisel's titles of the era, it has more recently prompted scholarly reconsideration of the cultural caricatures embedded in its illustrations.
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