A marketing hunt at UC San Diego’s Geisel Library turned into something else entirely. Publishers searching the Dr. Seuss archives for anniversary material found a completed, unpublished manuscript by Theodor Geisel, the writer better known as Dr. Seuss.

The book, “Sing the 50 United States!,” was found last May among about 20,000 files in the archives, which hold artwork and writing donated by Geisel’s widow, Audrey Geisel, after his death in 1991. Geisel had also designed what appeared to be a cover image.

“This is kismet,” said 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.”

The manuscript was found when Dr. Seuss Enterprises and publishers from Penguin Random House visited the archives looking for new marketing material tied to the 70th anniversaries of “The Cat in the Hat” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

It is not the first Dr. Seuss book published after his death. In 2015, “What Pet Should I Get?” was published from a mostly completed manuscript left in a drawer in the Geisel home in La Jolla, California, under the direction of Audrey Geisel. In 2019, “Horse Museum” was adapted from an unrhymed manuscript and sketches and completed with illustrator Andrew Joyner.

But Reynolds said “Sing the 50 United States!” stood out because it was complete.

“Ted Geisel gave us a perfect manuscript. We did not have to change a single punctuation mark in it,” Reynolds said.

The book was published on June 2, just over a year after the manuscript was found. Reynolds said that timeline was unprecedented because there were no story edits or grammatical changes.

“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 said.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises CEO Susan Brandt said one awkward line stayed exactly as Geisel wrote it: “Oh… ohhh… oh… OH! Okla- Oklahoma!”

Finishing the illustrations became the main challenge. Geisel left storyboard-like sketches, which showed that he intended the story to be led by Cat and the Little Cats, his assistants.

Brandt said the team approached the project differently from newer Seuss spin-off books.

“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 said. “This one, I’d say we’re trying to get close.”

Veteran illustrator Tom Brannon completed the images. Reynolds’ team chose to use only the colours featured in “The Cat in the Hat” and “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut,” because Geisel was particular about them.

There is no date on the manuscript and no record of when or why Geisel wrote it, though it had to come 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,” said 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?”

Claasen and Brandt said it is possible Geisel meant the work for “The Cat in the Hat Songbook,” published in 1967.

His drafts include musical directions, including “groan” before the “Oklahoma” line and “Short worried chord” when Cat forgets the 50th state. At the top of one typed copy of “Sing the 50 United States!,” Geisel wrote: “For children’s voices, the younger, the better.”

Brandt said the drafts show how carefully Geisel worked.

“He labored. He took the job of writing children’s primaries so seriously,” Brandt said. “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.”

Brandt said she believes there are more usable works in the archive, including unfinished lessons on telling time and spelling, among them “How Well Can You Spell?” which she described as “almost” finished.

“You can see him playing with what he thought kids should know and learn,” Brandt said.

A year after ending publication and sales of six titles with racist and insensitive imagery, Geisel’s estate launched Seuss Studios with diverse, emerging authors using unpublished Geisel sketches for new picture books. Author Lala Watkins used a previously unseen sketch of a worm as the main character, Norbit, in her beginner book “Hello, Sun!”

“We can continue to put noise behind it,” Brandt said. “They resonate and they resonate and they resonate.”

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