Tufts Dental Medicine

Charles D. Cohen’s bio sums it up nicely: “He’s spent 25 years practicing dentistry, and 25,000 hours studying the life and work of Ted Geisel.” Geisel is better known as children’s book author Dr. Seuss, and Cohen, D87, has amassed the largest private collection of Seuss books, toys and ephemera in the world, including some stories that were originally published in magazines and then forgotten for decades.

In 2011, he helped bring some of those stories to light in the book The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories. His latest endeavor is Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories. Readers may recognize Horton the elephant, here just as determined and faithful to his word as he was in Horton Hatches the Egg. One story features Marco, the imaginative young protagonist from Geisel’s first children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published in 1937—but this time with the best excuse ever for being tardy to school.

Cohen’s introduction, enriched by those 25,000 hours of scholarship, explains how these lost stories came to be lost, where they fit into the Seuss cannon and how Geisel may have gotten his ideas. He surmises that the word Grinch, for example, is derived from the French word grincheux, which means “grouchy” or “like a sourpuss.” —Julie Flaherty