Cathy Goldsmith, president and publisher of the Beginner Books line and the Dr. Seuss publishing program at Random House.
She has been an art director at Random House for 38 years and worked with Dr. Seuss himself on the last six books published during his lifetime. She is the last of the publisher’s employees to have worked directly with Theodor Seuss Geisel, beginning in 1978. At the time, Goldsmith was a senior designer in the same department that she now heads. There was a bit of an intimidation factor for Goldsmith at the start. “I was 29 and he was in his early 70s. He was clearly the most famous and important person I’d ever met,” she recalled. “I would never dream of calling him ‘Ted.’ It gave rise to a certain awkwardness. No one at Random House called him ‘Mr. Geisel’ or ‘Dr. Seuss’—I didn’t know what to call him!” But any awkwardness over names wore off as the two became close collaborators, producing six books together. Goldsmith worked alongside Geisel on his final book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990). The author-illustrator was ill at that time and could not leave his California home. “It was the first time he was unable to come to New York and deliver a book himself,” Goldsmith said. “Usually he would call to say, ‘I’m coming to New York,’ which meant he was bringing a book. During those visits, we’d gather in the conference room and he read aloud to everyone,” she explained. So Goldsmith traveled to California to help finish the project. “Ted’s wife Audrey insisted I stay with them at their house, so he could take breaks between working. I stayed with him for three or four days while we finished working on color for the book,” she said. Geisel co-founded Beginner Books in 1958, along with his wife, Helen, and Phyllis Cerf, on the heels of the runaway success of The Cat in the Hatthe year before. As president of the division, he took a hands-on approach, up until his death in 1991, approving books for acquisition and reviewing sketches for each title. His creative process continues to inform Goldsmith’s work. “Still to this day I find myself working with an illustrator and thinking to myself, ‘I learned that from Ted,’ ” she said. “I learned about color—his sense of color was like nobody else’s—and the placement of type on the page. And he was particular about layouts.”
In addition to his work ethic, Goldsmith was struck by Geisel’s respect for children. “The most important thing I took away was that he never talked down to children, nor did he want anyone else to. He thought they were quite clever little creatures. He wanted to intrigue them—to make them want to read and keep coming back to books,” she said. “He understood that we were making books for children, and if we were lucky they’d take their love of reading with them into adulthood.”
Sales for Seuss’s books have only grown with time. “We sell more Dr. Seuss books today than we did when he was alive,” Goldsmith stated. “The books stand the test of time.” To date, Random House has sold more than 16 million copies of The Cat in the Hat in multiple editions; annual sales average 500,000 copies. The book has been translated into Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Estonian, Serbian, and Greek.
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