McElligot’s Pool was published by Random House in 1947, received a Caldecott Honor in 1948, and is the first of Seuss’s pure imagination-escalation books — the template for If I Ran the Zoo and Scrambled Eggs Super!. A boy, Marco (the same character from Mulberry Street), is fishing in a small, trash-filled pool. A farmer tells him he’s a fool — nothing lives in McElligot’s Pool. Marco imagines that the pool might be connected, underground, to the ocean — and if so, what fish might swim up through it?
What follows is a visual tour de force: pages of impossible fish in full color — fish with checkerboard patterns, fish shaped like sleds, fish with antlers, fish from the tropics and the Arctic, fish that have never been caught by anyone. The book was Seuss’s first full-color production and the first to display the extraordinary range of his visual imagination at full stretch.
Withdrawal
The book was withdrawn by Dr. Seuss Enterprises in March 2021 as one of six titles containing imagery considered racially insensitive. The specific objection was to the depiction of an “Eskimo Fish.” As with the other withdrawn titles, the market impact was immediate and dramatic.
Collecting McElligot’s Pool
First edition (Random House, New York, 1947): Pictorial boards with dust jacket. Caldecott Honor sticker on some copies.
Market values:
- First edition in jacket, pre-withdrawal: $2,000–$5,000
- First edition in jacket, post-withdrawal: $5,000–$15,000
- Without jacket: $500–$2,000
- Later printings (post-withdrawal): $100–$500
As a withdrawn Seuss title, a Caldecott Honor book, and a major visual achievement, this has become one of the most sought-after Seuss items in the collecting market.