The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories

The seven stories included in the book are as follows:[1]

• "The Bippolo Seed" (60th-anniversary edition): a duck finds a rare seed that can grant wishes, but when a cat tells him to wish for more than he needs, to get money they end up losing the seed in the process.
• "The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga": a rabbit escapes being eaten by convincing the bear that he has a rare but serious disorder.
• "Gustav, the Goldfish": a boy overfeeds a goldfish, causing it to grow until it fills a cellar. It was later adapted by Helen Palmer as "A Fish out of Water."
• "Tadd and Todd": two identical twins don't like being the same, so they try to be different by enhancing their looks but fail.
• "Steak for Supper": a boy brags about his steak dinner, causing strange beasts to follow him home, but it turns out to be stew.
• "The Strange Shirt Spot": a boy gets dirt on himself, to his mother's dismay, so he tries to get it off but fails.
• "The Great Henry McBride": a boy dreams of having five jobs, all at once.

The collection was published by Random House on September 27, 2011.[2] The stories originally appeared in magazines in 1950 and 1951.[2] Dr. Seuss died in 1991, and the stories were later rediscovered by Charles D. Cohen, a Massachusetts dentist and Seuss scholar.[3] Cathy Goldsmith of Random House encountered the magazine stories in one of Cohen's eBay auctions, around 2001.[3] Random House published Cohen's book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel in 2003.[3] He also contributed an introduction to this collection.[3]

Some elements of the stories in this collection appeared in later books. The story "Gustav the Goldfish" was the basis for the Beginner Book A Fish out of Water. The book was written by Seuss's first wife Helen Palmer Geisel, illustrated by P. D. Eastman, and published in 1961.[4] "Gustav the Goldfish" rhymes, unlike A Fish out of Water.[2] Seuss later reused the basic plot of "The Strange Shirt Spot" for 1958's The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.[4] In both stories, a character tries to remove a spot from various household items but only manages to transfer the spot to one object after another.[5]

The story "The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga" was recorded by Marvin Miller and released on the 1965 album Dr. Seuss presents..."Fox in Socks" and "Green Eggs & Ham" on RCA Records.

• Nel, Philip (2007). The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss And His Cats. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-83369-4.