This rare discovery led to a new Dr. Seuss book just in time for America 250

SAN DIEGO – Tucked in an unassuming hallway at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego are troves of artwork and writing of the late Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Here, you can thumb through original sketches from "The Cat in the Hat" and see margin notes with directions for the printer. If you look closely at a framed draft of "Oh, the Places You'll Go," you can see where Geisel taped scrap paper for edits.

The Dr. Seuss archives are a glimpse into the mind of the storyteller whose zany rhymes transformed children's literature. He died in 1991, and his widow, Audrey Geisel, donated the bulk of his work to the library.

Last May, Dr. Seuss Enterprises and publishers from Penguin Random House visited the archives to hunt for new marketing material for the 70th anniversaries of "The Cat in the Hat" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." What they found was entirely unexpected.

"Sing the 50 United States!", nestled amid some 20,000 files, was a completed, unpublished manuscript. Geisel had even designed what appeared to be a cover image.

"This is kismet," says Cat Reynolds, executive editor for Dr. Seuss Publishing and Beginner Books at Penguin Random House. "This is a coincidence of cosmic proportions that we were gifted this manuscript in this archive at this exact moment to really celebrate Ted Geisel and his contributions to children's literature and the American canon as a whole."

How publishers uncovered and restored a brand new Dr. Seuss book

This isn't the first posthumous Seuss book. In 2015, under the direction of Audrey Geisel, "What Pet Should I Get?" published from a mostly completed manuscript. The project was not in the archives but instead left in a drawer in the Geisel home in La Jolla, California. In 2019, "Horse Museum" came out, adapted from an unrhymed manuscript and sketches and completed with illustrator Andrew Joyner.

But "Sing the 50 United States!" was special in its completeness.

"Ted Geisel gave us a perfect manuscript. We did not have to change a single punctuation mark in it," Reynolds says at another interview in New York City, sitting in the Seuss-themed conference room at the Penguin Random House offices.

"Sing" hit shelves June 2, just over a year after the manuscript was found. This is an unprecedented timeline, Reynolds says, as there were no story edits or grammatical changes. In fact, as we're talking in the archives, Dr. Seuss Enterprises CEO Susan Brandt candidly tells me she doesn't care for the awkward "Oh… ohhh… oh… OH! Okla- Oklahoma!" but that's what Geisel wrote so it stayed.

"This time, what they were looking at was letter for letter, punctuation mark for punctuation mark ... so that readers had the most authentic version," Reynolds says.

Finishing the illustrations was the primary challenge. Geisel left storyboard-like sketches, so they knew he intended the story to be helmed by Cat and the Little Cats, his assistants. When publishing new Seuss books, there's a key difference between interpreting Geisel's style for new spin-off books (like "If It Were My Birthday Party" written "by" the Cat in the Hat) and "ghosting" as Geisel, like in this book.

"It depends on what the project is. Are you really trying to get as close as you can to the man or are you going to pay homage to him?" Brandt says. "This one, I'd say we're trying to get close."

Veteran illustrator Tom Brannon finished the images. Reynolds' team decided to use only the colors featured in "The Cat in the Hat" and "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut" (which also features Cat) because Geisel was so particular about them.

See exclusive sketches and manuscript drafts from Dr. Seuss archives

There's no date on the manuscript and no records of when or why Geisel wrote "Sing," though it had to have been written after Hawaii became a state in 1959.

"I think this was a hard book and maybe that's why he didn't publish it, because it's not his usual rhyme scheme at all," says Lynda Corey Claasen, director of special collections and archives at the UC San Diego Library. "Whether he just didn't get around to it or thought he was going to perfect it or change something, who knows?"

It's possible Geisel intended this for "The Cat in the Hat Songbook," published in 1967, Claasen and Brandt theorize. In his drafts, Geisel includes the audio descriptor "groan" before the "Oklahoma" line. It's been faithfully sung in the book's accompanying song. There are other written musical directions too, like "Short worried chord" when Cat forgets the final, 50th state.

Looking at Geisel's drafts is like looking at an instruction manual. "For children's voices, the younger, the better," he wrote at the top of one typed copy of "Sing the 50 United States!" These manuscript pages and sketches, shared exclusively with USA TODAY, show the many drafts, sometimes with only slight tweaks, as Geisel fiddled with the state order and how it would sound when read aloud.

"He labored. He took the job of writing children's primaries so seriously," Brandt says. "It took him over a year to write a book, if not longer, and you can also see in some of his writings, maybe, his frustration that people thought it was easy."

New ways to honor Dr. Seuss' legacy

Brandt believes there are more usable works in the Geisel archives. There are unfinished lessons on telling time and spelling, including one called "How Well Can You Spell?" that's "almost" finished.

"You can see him playing with what he thought kids should know and learn," Brandt says.

In other ways, new Seuss ventures are branching out from the man himself. A year after ceasing publication and sales of six titles with racist and insensitive imagery, his estate unveiled Seuss Studios with diverse, emerging authors at the helm. These authors use unpublished Geisel sketches for new picture books. Author Lala Watkins used a never-before-seen sketch of a worm as her main character, Norbit in her beginner book "Hello, Sun!"

Dr. Seuss Enterprises is leaning into the Seuss books that "stand the test of time" and the illustrations that never found a home in a story. The drafted sketches and words allow publishers to extend the world of Seuss into a new era of authors and readers.

"We can continue to put noise behind it," Brandt says. "They resonate and they resonate and they resonate."

Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: This rare discovery led to a new Dr. Seuss book just in time for America 250

Reporting by Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published June 27, 2026 at 8:01 AM.