Illustrator/author Dr. Seuss [Theodor Geisel] didn’t always write children’s books. Long before forging a place in American history as the inspiration for thousands of boring, painfully-naive high school commencement speeches, Geisel was a keen editorial cartoonist.
1931 saw the release of Boners. From the title page:
“Boners Being a Collection of Schoolboy Wisdom, or Knowledge as It Is Sometimes Written, Compiled from Classrooms and Examination Papers by Alexander Abingdon, and Illustrated by DR. SEUSS.”
[And if you’re keeping track of details, it’s pronounced “Soy-ce” as in “rejoice.” Not “Soo-se” as in “juice.”]
Geisel’s illustrations in this short, witty book are masterful. The small 102-page hardcover book has about a dozen illustrations on definitions, literature/arts, history, math, science, language/rhetoric, etc. I’ve included below some scans of Seuss’s illustrations of boners in math, science and history. You can pick up a copy of Boners from AbeBooks for just a few dollars. Enjoy!
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It seems your search button doesn’t work? Am I the only one having this difficulty? You are in Cooperstown - as in Baseball Hall of Fame?
David,
We’re working on the search button. We just switched to BraveNet for newsletter subscription [located at the top of the left sidebar]. BraveNet’s code has a pesky little feature that wrangles control of submit forms on the entire page. So, when someone tries to search, BraveNet treats the search term as an e-mail address for subscription and denies it. It’s a pain that I could live without, but we’ll work out the kink soon enough.
As for Cooperstown, you’ve got it - the Hall of Fame, home of William and James Fenimore Cooper, etc. A little over an hour from Westerlo, yes? I’ll admit, I haven’t been there. [and as a side note, your directory of free war games may have killed my productivity for the evening… ;)]