One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

A book by Dr. Seuss.
Starts out with fish, and goes on to describe all sorts of wonderful fun (rhyming) nonsense.

My favourite passage is:

Look what we found
in the park
in the dark.
We will take him home.
We will name him Clark.

He will live at our house.
He will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this?
We don't know.

Some other quotes:

 

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
Do you know how to milk this kind of cow?
We can do it, since we know how.
If you've never done these things, you should.
These things are fun, and fun is good.

There and here, here and there
Funny things are everywhere.

Compare and contrast the first quote to the moral maxims of the bulk of children's literature and you can get an idea of just how revolutionary this book was. As for the second quote...you can understand how useful it is...

 

Now imagine this being illustrated by a painting by a young Picasso, and read by Orson Welles: 

My shoe is off

My foot is cold

I have a bird

I like to hold.

 

My hat is old.

My teeth are gold.

 

My shoe is off 

My foot is cold

And now my story

is all told.

 

Amazing.

"One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" is a 1959 work by Dr. Seuss. It has no central plot, but is instead just a series of unrelated rhymes and illustration, with the only unifying theme being "funny things are everywhere".

By the time that Seuss wrote One Fish, Two Fish, he had been writing and illustrating children's books for 23 years. This however, was the first Seuss book to be purely an exercise in imagination and rhyming, with the absence of either the narrative or moral lesson that characterizes his other works. It is also a book for beginning readers. Perhaps for these reasons, it is one of his more popular works.

Strangely enough for one of Seuss' more wild and non-linear works, the art in this volume is fairly tame. Although it has lots of Seuss' trademarked animals, odd furry beasts in various levels of anthropomorphism; it lacks Seuss' loopy, physics-defying landscapes. It also, perhaps for technical reasons, lacks the colorful palette of some of his later works. I don't know why this works lacks some of Seuss' artistic flair--- why don't you go ask your dad?