LITERATURE WATCH : Of Poodles & Noodles

The late Dr. Seuss had a delicious sense of the absurd, of the odd juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous, and of the infinite possibilities for pure silliness contained in ordinary language and imagery. Who else but Dr. Seuss could present green eggs and ham as a tempting treat or depict “beetles fight(ing) battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles”? Or endlessly delight children with a cat that makes a terrible mess and then cleans it all up?

When Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, died in 1991 at age 87, he left behind drawings, sketches, notebooks, tapes and other original memorabilia from his remarkable career as a children’s writer. Some of that material is housed at UCLA. The rest of Geisel’s papers, 4,000 individual items, have now found a permanent new home in the Central Library of UC San Diego. There they will share space with slightly weightier but perhaps no more important collections on 20th-Century science and American poetry.

And beginning next week a selection from this remarkable collection of Seussiana will be on public display next to the library’s newly renamed Theodor S. and Audrey S. Geisel Room.

The donation comes from Audrey Geisel, the author’s widow. She said she and her husband had talked about having his work at the library ever since UCSD was built.

“The incongruity of having the Cat ensconced next to a book stack with the works of Jonas Salk would delight him,” she said. It delights us too.