Blumf

Unpublished Dr. Seuss manuscript reveals author's doubts, new word  (Yahoo News, by Mike Krumboltz, 10/22/2010)

I have always loved Dr. Seuss.  I can practically recite the first five pages of several of my favorite Seuss classics.  But I was still surprised to learn that there are actually scholars who devote their lives to studying Theodore Geisel, and the mountain of childrens books he penned as the famous doctor.

Attention has been focused on Dr. Seuss and his works lately because an unused Seuss manuscript sold for $34,000 at auction.  As I clicked through the pictures of the hand-drawn story boards, I began to understand how scholars could learn a lot by studying the rhyming stories we all loved as children.  The pages were not pretty or perfect, but rather messy and quite haphazard, with evidence of fine-tuning and re-thinking apparent everywhere.  That is where the term "blumf" comes in.  Instead of leaving a dash, or a star as a placeholder, Seuss used the made-up word "blumf" to annotate incomplete parts of the story.

I have always thought of Seuss as master of tonal writing, or the ability to make sounds of words and sentences flow naturally into each other.   "Blumf" is a clear example of that genius.  I like saying it so much I am going to start using it instead of "bleep" to replace swear words!

Blumf Blumf Blumf Blumf, Blumf Blumf Blumf Blumf


See the auctioned manuscript pages in detail here