Penguin Random House | New York, 05/29/2018

Random House Children’s Books Challenges Readers to Read 20 Million ‘Dr. Seuss Words’ this Summer

The “Dr. Seuss’s Word Challenge” is here: Starting today, Random House Children’s Books und Dr. Seuss Enterprises will be collecting words from Dr. Seuss’s books. Readers are invited to register the Dr. Seuss words they have read on the popular website seussville.com  . The goal is to collect 20 million Dr. Seuss words by the end of July. Prizes include a cruise. With sales of his books exceeding 650 million copies, Dr. Seuss (1904-1991) is the most successful children’s author in U.S. history.

Dr. Seuss, the beloved American children’s author who died in 1991, was a true wordsmith. He loved words and rhymes, and constructed ingenious wordplays that have lost none of their appeal even many decades after their publication. So he probably would have fully approved of his publisher's latest idea: Random House Children's Books is launching the Dr. Seuss's Word Challenge (#SeussWordChallenge) today together with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the administrator of the famous author’s estate.

The goal of the competition, which is being held online and in the real world – at numerous bookstores which are hosting their own Word-A-Thon reading events – is to have 20 million words read from the works of Dr. Seuss. The read words can be entered on the official Dr. Seussville homepage seussville.com until July 31, and there are prizes to be won, including a cruise. The “Word-a-rometer” on the website shows how many words have already been read.

Random House Children's Books itself is providing the first hundred Dr. Seuss words with the recently published picture book “Dr. Seuss's 100 First Words,” which lets parents teach their small children the 100 most important first words in the English language using some of the author's most popular books such as “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,” “Green Eggs and Ham” and “Hop on Pop.”

“Teaching children that reading could be fun was a lifelong goal of Ted’s,” says Susan Brandt, President of Dr. Seuss Enterprises. “It’s fitting that this program is taking the form of a challenge, as it was a challenge that inspired him to write ‘The Cat in the Hat’! We are so pleased to offer a program that encourages reading in a fun way, while also helping to prevent the summer reading slide.”

The Dr. Seuss's Word Challenge partners are Scripps National Spelling Bee and Carnival Cruise Lines. The non-profit organization Scripps National Spelling Bee works to promote reading comprehension and spelling skills among students in the U.S. It will promote the Word Challenge at its major annual competition just outside Washington D.C., which continues until Friday. Events will include a Dr. Seuss–themed Word-A-Thon and spelling bee to be streamed live on the Spelling Bee Facebook page, as well as appearances by the Dr. Seuss character the Cat in the Hat. The Dr. Seuss bus will also be on-site with its offers.

The second partner is the cruise company Carnival Cruise Lines, which will host a reading event on board its ships in June and July, during which it will track the words read on board by guests, and subsequently log them on the seussville.com website.

Ted Geisel (1904-1991), better known as Dr. Seuss, is an icon of American children's literature, whose works have sold more than 650 million copies to date. Over the decades, the artist and author inspired and fascinated entire generations of children with his works. Their enduring success is based on the charming drawings and timelessly wonderful stories.