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Understanding 9/11tv Dr. Seuss Collection CSPAN January 8, 2017 10:59am-11:12am EST
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i'm sorry but before me there was a whole generation of mexican american scholars who had to fight in the trenches, and they were called -- intellectuals. i ride on their shoulders. it also means we don't just have it to be black and white, brown and white. this is about the knicks. so if you read my book, read it for the pictures. you might just learn something. spirit c-span is in san diego learning more about the literacy. we are here at the central library in downtown san diego honoring doctor seuss. up next we take you to use his san diego to learn more about the life of a san diego native and iconic children's author. >> i think some of the first things that come to my when people hear the word dr. seuss
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are the amazing range of book titles that they probably have read to their children, possibly have had read to themselves by their parents, my friends, whatever. and what a whimsical person he probably was. theodor seuss sky so was not born in this area of course. he was born in massachusetts, started coming to san diego on visits in the late 1920s. eventually moved to san diego, continue to live there for over 40 years. ..
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at that time he actually used his own name. he had, he and some of his friends had a little run in with the dean once because face drank a bit too much and he was banned from working on the papers so started using the name seuss so that he could get his cartoons into the paper. well, seuss was actually his middle name. he is theordoe geisel and suze was his mother's maiden name.
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he became more interested in drawing and one of the things we have in the collection is his notebooks from oxford university and i think as you took a look through it, as other people have you see he spent a lot of time in class making little cartoons and doodling down his page, perhaps more of that then he was taking notes area so i think he and then his first wife who convinced him i think that he was perhaps better suited to a life of an artist rather than a writer, came back and they came back to this country, tried to then make it as an artist and he did. so the first children's book he published was to call to think that i saw it on mulberry street, he didn't do that until 1937. the cat and the hat came out in 57, quite a few years later of course and that was probably his most popular
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book that he did but he did do illustrations for other authors early on. it wasn't just his own books that he did. i think the cat in the hat, he saw his publishing career take off, it was an incredibly popular book and it made people think about a different way of teaching, of how children learn. it was very different from a lot of the children's book that were popular at the time such as the kind of book i might have read when iwas a child . that kind of very simplistic approach to children's literature. his work of course, the cat in the hat was much more mischievous and i think appealed to the child in adults as well as to the children who were reading it. there's this sort of vote in the cat. we have the doctor seuss collection here at ucsc which was a gift from mrs. die so
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in 1995. ted geisel had died but it was his wish that his materials be here for his devoted fans worldwide to be able to come and use these materials and to have his legacy preserved.the collection is about 18,000 of ted geisel's original drawings. it expands early years in the 1920s, some of theearliest known drawings he ever did . all the way up until the last book that he published and then most recently of course some other drawings just discovered at the house so those books are now being pushed by random house, ted geisel's longtime publisher. now is the fun part and i'm going to show you some of the things that are in the doctor seuss collection. i'm using the cat in the hat as an example because i think
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that's a title that most people are familiar with . these are some of ted geisel's earliest catches and you can see they are very rough sketches as he's putting out his story. he treated these just like rings from a coffee cup, sort of on his desk and you can see how rough the sketches are and just as he's getting an idea of howit's going to look on the page . you can see when you get over here that he's always working on a two-page spread. he has his words at the time sort of cut out from other papers and pasted here where hethinks they might go on the page . then when he graduated from the rough sketches, he would tend to make more finished drawings in ink, black and white and i think you can see
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the difference, there's a very rough sketch of the house, the first page , but it was too wet to play so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day. then, when he's happy with that, he's added what would be called a color overlay to the storyboard. and this tells the printer what color to use and what percentage of the colors to use so this would be 100 percent blue, 100 percent red , and here's another storyboard. see the black and white drawings. but here, this is only going to get 40 percent red as opposed to the 100 percent red down here. so the cat in the hat, click familiar.
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these are some of the earliest known drawings by doctor seuss. these are from the 1920s. as you see, this is again, he's used ink and pencil, this is kind of a tough dragon looking quite evil i think and this is a very funny sketch, romulus and remus. you see here the seven hills of rome. there goes romulus and remus area we have no idea for what purpose these were drawn other than perhaps sort of his creative urge. they're not in any book. one of my favorite things in the collection is doctor seuss's notebook from when he was a graduate student at oxford in the 1920s after he graduated from dartmouth. you can see these are just a couple of pages and we have
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taken care to preserve them but i've taken these out of the notebook and you can just be that while he was taking a few notes here, he was really actually quite happy drawing all sorts of little dogs, hounds down the side of the page. this was a class on poetry, the poet keats. here's another one where he's just drawing birds and making kind of doodles on all sorts of things. and you can see even within the covers of the notebook itself, all sorts of wonderful little doodles and drawings that he made area i've also put out some of his political cartoons. on ted geisel worked as an editorial cartoonist for pm magazine, 1941 to 1943 before he himself went into the army during world war ii.
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and a lot of these are quite funny. this one was sort of the nazi spy dressed as a palm tree being dropped from an airplane into the jungles of brazil using charm and ingenuity, he will immediately will and marry some young brazilian palm tree with with advanced groundwork such as this, my invasion of south america is practically in the bag, says adolf hitler. i think the cartoons although theearliest ones deal mostly with the war, the war effort , the antiwar america first initiative, a lot of the later cartoons i think are as appropriate today as they were in the 1940s when they had to do with the do-nothing congress is, high taxes, inflation. i think the guys all
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collection, ted's original drawings are important to have here at ucsb. researchers can come and use them whether it's a faculty member who might be teaching a class in children's literature or someone who is teaching american history who might want to use the political cartoons he did in the 1940s. but i think most of all, uc san diego is a very heavy science and medicine campus and i think having the doctor seuss drawings here also adds an element again of quincy and non-science and you can think of sort of the cat in the hat running around through all of these eucalyptus trees on campus, maybe causing a little bit of mischief. i think doctor seuss is important to the history of literature. he wrote a new kind of children's book, is works
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remain incredibly popular through the world,they've been translated into many different languages . i think sometimes that loses a little bit in translation because he made up so many words and it sort of throws the rhyme scheme off but i think his genius will endure. >> one rodriguez cumbria led the first european expedition of what is now the west coast of the united states. in september 15 42, he sailed into today's san diego bay . cabrillo national monument located near his landing point was erected in 1913 to commemorate his discovery. up next we continue our look at san diego's literary scene as we speak with local author benjamin bergen on why people use profanity and what it says about us and our language. >> the words themselves
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