This webpage discusses the contents of one of the six books that Dr. Seuss Enterprises withdrew from print on March 2, 2021. An overview discussion is here.

In "The Cat's Quizzer" (1976), the Cat in the Hat presents a bunch of illustrated questions, some of which are clever, some tricky, and some downright silly. The reader is invited to see if he or she is "smarter than a Zozzfozzel," the family name of two kids who got every question wrong.

This book was published twenty years later than any of the other five that the publishers took out of print; thus the sensibilities of the time were twenty years closer to ours, and I didn't find many things that they might have taken as reason to withdraw this book. However, the publishers probably found that the assumption implicit in this question, namely that readers wouldn't be expected to know the name of those weird eating implements used in Japan, was a poke in the eye to kids of Japanese (or other Asian) ancestry for whom chopsticks are just part of daily life.

On this page, with questions such as "how old do you have to be to drive?" or "to be President?", the publishers probably also found this question and its illustration to give the same placement outside "normal" for such kids. The phrase "a Japanese" also sounds kind of outdated to me somehow, even though it's grammatically parallel to "an American" or "a European"; I don't know if they found it objectionable.

I also don't know if the publishers found that this "true or false" question made Ireland sound weird or outlandish. I would have said "magical," a characterization with which many Irish folk would agree, but I include it on this webpage so you can draw your own conclusions.

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Disclaimer

Original material here is copyright 2022 by Mark Looper, but obviously I claim no ownership of the images or text that I reproduce here from the works of Dr. Seuss, which are copyright by Dr. Seuss Enterprises. I reproduce them here under terms of scholarly and journalistic fair use. Reuse of my copyrighted material is authorized under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

new 1 March 2022