''On Beyond Zebra!'' is a 1955 illustrated

children's book Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reade ...

by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. In this take on the genre of alphabet book, Seuss presents, instead of the twenty-six letters of the conventional

English alphabet Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 Letter (alphabet), letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word ''alphabet'' is a Compound (linguistics), compound of ''alpha'' and ''beta'', t ...

, twenty additional letters that purportedly follow them.

Plot

The young narrator, not content with the confines of the ordinary

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

, reports on additional letters beyond Z, with a fantastic creature corresponding to each new letter. For example, the letter "FLOOB" is the first letter in Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs, which have large buoyant heads and float serenely in the water. In order, the letters, followed by the creatures for which the letters are the first letter when spelling their names, are YUZZ (Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz), WUM (Wumbus), UM (Umbus), HUMPF (Humpf-Humpf-a-Dumpfer), FUDDLE (Miss Fuddle-dee-Duddle), GLIKK (Glikker), NUH (Nutches), SNEE (Sneedle), QUAN (Quandary), THNAD (Thnadners), SPAZZ (Spazzim), FLOOB (Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs), ZATZ (Zatz-it), JOGG (Jogg-oons), FLUNN (Flunnel), ITCH (Itch-a-pods), YEKK (Yekko), VROO (Vrooms), and HI! (High Gargel-orum). The book ends with an unnamed letter that is substantially more complicated than those with names. A list of all the additional letters is shown at the end.

Analysis

Judith and Neil Morgan, Geisel's biographers, note that most of the letters resemble elaborate

monogram A monogram is a motif (visual arts), motif made by overlapping or combining two or more letters or other graphemes to form one symbol. Monograms are often made by combining the initials of an individual or a company, used as recognizable symbo ...

s, "perhaps in

Old Persian Old Persian is one of two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of the Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as (I ...

".Morgan & Morgan, p. 152 These letters are not officially encoded in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, but the independent

ConScript Unicode Registry The ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Areas (PUA) for the encoding of artificial scripts, such as those for constructed languages. It was founded by John Woldema ...

provides an unofficial assignment of code points in the

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

for them.

Legacy

Some of the animals from ''On Beyond Zebra!'' appear in the 1975 CBS TV Special '' The Hoober-Bloob Highway''. In this segment, Hoober-Bloob babies don't have to be humans if they don't choose to be, so Mr. Hoober-Bloob shows them a variety of different animals; including ones from ''On Beyond Zebra!'' and '' If I Ran the Zoo'' (1950). Such animals include: a Jogg-oon, a Sneedle, a Zatz-it, a Wumbus, and a Yekko. The book was infrequently reprinted.

Open Library Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet ...

lists American editions in 1955, 1983, and 1999. A British edition was published in 2012. In the 2008 American animated film ''

Horton Hears a Who! ''Horton Hears a Who!'' is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss. It was published in 1954 by Random House. This book tells the story of Horton the Elephant and his adventures saving Who ...

'', Zatz-its appear as residents of the Jungle of Nool.

Withdrawal from publication

On March 2, 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, owner of the rights to Seuss's works, withdrew ''On Beyond Zebra!'' and five other books from publication because of imagery they deemed "hurtful and wrong". The book depicts a character called "Nazzim of Bazzim". Nazzim is "of unspecified nationality". He rides a "Spazzim", a fantasy-creature resembling a

camel A camel (from and () from Ancient Semitic: ''gāmāl'') is an even-toed ungulate in the genus ''Camelus'' that bears distinctive fatty deposits known as "humps" on its back. Camels have long been domesticated and, as livestock, they provid ...

. The ''

Vancouver Sun The ''Vancouver Sun'', also known as the ''Sun'', is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The newspaper is currently published by the Pacific Newspaper Group, a division of Postmedia Network, and is the larg ...

'' described the "problematic imagery" as "probably the least obvious" of the six books removed from publication. Kyle Smith of the ''

National Review ''National Review'' is an American conservative editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs. The magazine was founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. Its editor-in-chief is Rich L ...

'' describes Nazzim as "a proud-looking camel-riding Arab nobleman". Smith argues that only someone "hypersensitive" would take offense at this image. According to an article of the ''

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The ''Pittsburgh Post-Gazette'', also known simply as the PG, is the largest newspaper serving Greater Pittsburgh, metropolitan Pittsburgh in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Descended from the ''Pittsburgh Gazette'', established in 1786 as the fi ...

'', Nazzim is a "vaguely Arab-looking character". McLaughlin notes that Dr. Seuss' books have been accused of featuring too few non-white people, but the then-recent decision withdrew from publication the ones that do feature non-white people. According to an article of '' Distractify'', Nazzim "is a man who appears to be of Middle Eastern descent". The animal that he rides resembles a camel.

References

Sources

* * * * * {{Dr. Seuss 1955 children's books Alphabet books American picture books Books by Dr. Seuss Books withdrawn after publication Children's books about animals Race-related controversies in literature Random House books Stereotypes of Arab people Works about zebras