Scrambled Eggs Super! was published by Random House in 1953 and is the third of Seuss’s escalation fantasies — a boy named Peter T. Hooper decides that ordinary hen’s eggs are insufficient for his cooking and sets out to collect eggs from increasingly exotic birds: the Ruffle-Necked Sala-ma-goox, the Spritz (which hides its eggs in solid ice), the Mt. Strookoo Cuckoo, and dozens of others. Each bird is more improbable than the last, each nesting habitat more remote, and each egg-collection method more elaborate.
The book was withdrawn by Dr. Seuss Enterprises in March 2021 as one of six titles containing imagery considered racially insensitive, making it the rarest of the six withdrawn titles (it had the smallest print runs and least cultural recognition).
Collecting Scrambled Eggs Super!
First edition (Random House, New York, 1953): Pictorial boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in jacket, pre-withdrawal: $1,500–$4,000
- First edition in jacket, post-withdrawal: $4,000–$12,000
- Without jacket: $500–$1,500
As the least well-known of the withdrawn Seuss titles, and therefore the one with the fewest copies preserved by collectors before the withdrawal, Scrambled Eggs Super! has the highest potential for price appreciation.