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The license plates on his silver Cadillac bear the word GRINCH. But no one in his neighborhood of La Jolla, Calif., is fooled. The driver is no grouch. He is Theodor Geisel, better known by his flowing pseudonymous signature Dr. Seuss. He celebrated turning 80 last week by turning out his 42nd children's story, The Butter Battle Book (Random House; 48 pages; $6.95). An arms-race "preachment," as he calls it, the tale features no grinches, just a confrontational competition between average, everyday Yooks and Zooks who are suspicious of each other because the former prefer eating bread with the butter facing up while the latter like their butter facing down. The Yooks and Zooks devise bigger and more outrageous war machines, until each holds a Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo "filled with mysterious Moo-Lacka-Moo" capable of blowing the other to Sala-ma-goo. Says Geisel: "I don't know if it's an adult book for children or a children's book for adults."
The Massachusetts-born author is a long way (100 million books sold worldwide) from his 1937 start. But he still puts in eight hours a day, five days a week at his desk, although the desk now overlooks the Pacific from the dream house he helped design. Geisel, whose nom de plume is an amalgam of his mother's maiden name and a self-bestowed doctorate, "which came from the fact that I saved my father $25,000 by dropping out of Oxford," next plans a nonsense book. He is also working on a Broadway play for adults, and this year Coleco, purveyors from the Cabbage Patch, will offer a new line of Seuss dolls.
Like most of his books, Butter Battle took eight months to get right. He bristles at the suggestion that such fare takes less talent or work than literature for grownups. "When you write for kids, if you don't write more clearly and concisely and cut out all the mumbo jumbo, you lose your audience," he says. But the result can "seem frightfully barren because they only want the meat of it." If the idea of a Seuss book being barren seems surprising, imagine the reaction of the occasional young visitor bold enough to call on the Wizard of Whimsy. "They expect me to be a cow with a nose that lights up," says Geisel with a shrug. "I'm too square."