Bennett Cerf’s Book of Riddles was published by Random House in 1960 as part of the Beginner Books series — the imprint that Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) had created in 1957 with The Cat in the Hat. The series was designed to provide entertaining reading material for children just learning to read, using controlled vocabularies and simple sentence structures. Cerf’s contribution was to adapt the format to riddles — “What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck” — with illustrations by Roy McKie that were as simple and engaging as the text.
The book sold phenomenally. Beginner Books were distributed through school book fairs, department stores, and bookshops, and Book of Riddles was one of the series’ biggest titles, selling millions of copies over the following decades. Cerf followed it with More Riddles (1961), Book of Laughs (1959), and several other children’s humor collections, all in the same format.
The publishing context is as interesting as the book itself. Cerf was not only the author but the head of the publishing company, and the Beginner Books imprint was his idea — or at least his enthusiastic endorsement of Geisel’s proposal. The series was a commercial goldmine for Random House, generating steady revenue that subsidized the firm’s literary publishing (Faulkner, O’Neill, and Camus did not sell like Dr. Seuss). Cerf understood, better than most literary publishers, that the children’s market was the foundation of a healthy publishing business.
The riddles themselves are not sophisticated — they are puns, plays on words, and simple logical tricks aimed at six-to-eight-year-olds. But they serve a genuine educational purpose: they teach children that language is flexible, that words can have multiple meanings, and that the gap between what is said and what is meant can be a source of pleasure rather than confusion. For many American children of the 1960s and 1970s, Book of Riddles was their first encounter with the idea that language could be fun.
Collecting Bennett Cerf’s Book of Riddles
First edition (Random House, New York, 1960): Beginner Books format, illustrated boards.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $10–$30
- Later printings: $2–$5
Millions of copies were printed, and the book remains in print. First printings can be identified by the “200/200” price on the dust jacket flap.