Released in 1957, “The cat in the hat” is no ordinary children’s book. Theodor Geisel, who wrote under the pen name “Dr. Seuss”, was restricted to the use of only 250 words, and the puzzle of how to turn this miniature vocabulary into an entertaining, rhyming story book took nine months to solve. The job fell to a brilliant man with the playful and sometimes naughty mind of a child, and the result changed the way children all over the world learned to read. The challenge for the book’s production came from an article in “Life” magazine in the mid-1950s. The feature exposed the poor literacy rate among American children. The article’s theory was that children’s educational books were so boring that kids could not possibly want
