The very first thing the reader of classic Seuss notices upon coming across The King’s Stilts is the lack of rhymes. This is early Seuss—more Theodor Geisel than Dr. Seuss, really—and it was written before the author had discovered his forte and seized his niche in children’s literature. Just opening the book for the first time can come as a shock to those raised on repetitions of readings of books about cats wearing hats, ham and eggs of an unnatural hue, star-bellied Sneetches and a certain pachyderm with a gargantuan heart. Randomly open the book can land you on the unthinkable: one page covered entirely in text and the other with illustrations of recognizable human characters.
For the most part, however, the construction is equitable: the top of a page is half of a single panoramic illustration while the bottom half of each page is text. Regular text, with strange typeface, laid out in paragraphs of standard grade. The thing simply does not look like a Dr. Seuss book and therein lies the problem.
Technically speaking, there is nothing at all wrong about The King’s Stilts. The story of King Birtram protecting his people and land against potential devastating flood in a narrative involving pesky birds, arboreal dams, police cats and, of course, stilts, is interesting and well told. Unfortunately, it also feels just a little too similar to the immediately preceding book by Seuss in which a feudal monarch predominates over the plot. Of course, Geisel cannot be blamed; before he revolutionized the genre by introducing big-hearted moose and reptilian metaphors for Hitler, children’s literature was absolutely dominated by kings and queens and princes and princesses. Thank goodness he moved on, found his own way and brought into the world the idea of Grinches overlooking Whoville. Not that King Birtram (or King Derwin, for that matter) aren’t interesting in their own way, within their own sphere, and in stories told in prose, but neither are they a match for the classic characters and story within the more familiar realm of the kingdom of Seuss.
On the other hand, The King’s Stilts title page includes the credit “Written and Illustrated by Dr. Seuss” and it must be admitted that the illustrations accompanying the mundane story composed in prose rank among some of the best in any Seuss book, ever. They are simple pencil drawings mostly in black and white with deposits of red subtly but brilliantly added to make them pop. Some, like that of Eric racing over fences and thickets in his disguise and Lord Droon creeping down the slating stairway are nothing less than minor masterpieces of chiaroscuro manipulation of black and white in which the seemingly negligible additions of red are utterly transformative. One can argue that the illustrative effects of more familiar Seuss characters dominating the text on entire two-fold spans of pages applied with liberal amounts of fantastical color might be more vivid and unusual, but when it comes to sheer artistry, what one is left with at the end of The King’s Stilts is a sense of relief that Seuss embraced the power of rhyme tinged with some regret that he turned his back on the pencil in his palette.
