Dr. Seuss Enterprises has announced it will discontinue publication of six Dr. Seuss books. Its stated reason is that they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
Whatever you think of this decision, you need to remember what every writer knows and many on the right forget: Publishers have no obligation to publish, except when they’re bound by a contract. The villain of the piece isn’t Dr. Seuss Enterprises, but absurdly long copyright terms. Theodore Geisel died in 1991. And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street was published in 1937. It won’t enter the public domain until, I think, 2033.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises is in a difficult situation, as it’s seen as the official voice of Dr. Seuss. Other publishers could contextualize public-domain books, add introductions, omit illustrations, or do anything else they like. They wouldn’t have to target eight-year-old readers. They wouldn’t be seen, except perhaps by wokes, as responsible for everything said and shown in the book.
I haven’t read the books in question lately, so I won’t comment on them directly. Some of Geisel’s World War II cartoons unjustly portrayed Japanese-Americans as fifth columnists. No one needs to say he was flawless. But his books form an important part of our cultural history. They contain a lot of advice which is still good. It’s sad if some of them will be available only on the used book market and in pirated digital editions.
At the same time, the choice not to publish isn’t censorship. In spite of what some Republicans think, the First Amendment doesn’t say “Publishers shall not turn anything down.” The problem is that laws keeping works in copyright for 95 years, 30 years after the author’s death, give one organization the power to keep a book off the market.
I note that every article I’ve seen on this will show some Dr. Seuss illustration or book cover, but never show the offending art or verbiage. I guess that’s a good thing, we’d hate to get the radical right hoarding books, thus of course making more money for the publisher. But I don’t remember these things. We have the Internet, nothing dies. At least until the Internet does. Does everyone need to know that Cookie Monster used to be a different color or that Rowlf and Kermit used to train IBM employees? No, but the information should be (and that information is) available.
I can remember when the Muppets did coffee commercials. They used the same content for a bunch of different local brands, plugging in the name for each one. In my neighborhood it was La Tourraine coffee.
The best thing Dr. Seuss Enterprises can do at this point is to release the books into the public domain. It would make pirated editions and resales less lucrative, and it would save itself some pointless legal battles.
If books kept the copyright terms they were published under, the books in question (except for “The Cat’s Quizzer”) would be in the pubic domain.