The controversy over Dr. Seuss Enterprises deciding to pull six Dr. Seuss books from print due to the company determining that some of the racial stereotypes used in the books depict "people in ways that are hurtful and wrong" has led to the six books skyrocketing on the secondary market.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises was founded in 1993 by Audrey Geisel, the widow of Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, to help promote her late husband's work after his 1991 passing. Geisel passed away herself in 2018, so the company no longer has a direct connection to Geisel's estate. The six pulled books were And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer.
The media coverage of these books being pulled clearly led to some enterprising sellers and also some panicky buyers, as the prices for these books have been progressing beyond any normal levels of logical supply and demand.
Most of the books being pulled were not among Seuss' most popular releases, and as a result, there were less of them available for sale, but both On Beyond Zebra! and Scrambled Eggs Super! were going for roughly $15-20 right up until Tuesday morning, when the news was released. Now, Scrambled Eggs Super has sold for over $700 just by itself.
The two more popular pulled books are If I Ran the Zoo and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and that is where the prices really get into some crazy territories. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was the very first children's book that Seuss did (after a successful career as a cartoonist and advertisement artist) and as a result, has been printed many times over the years. So both And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo regularly sell on the secondary market.
The fact that they regularly sell on the secondary market makes it clear that there is a large supply of these books out there, and yet because of the hysteria of the news, even a popular book like And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street went from selling for as little as $6 earlier on Tuesday to over $300 after the news.
A popular seller has been the Seuss anthology books, like Six by Seuss...
Which has been selling for over $100 despite being a rather recent collection.
All six of the pulled books sold for nearly $5,000. These themed sets have proven quite popular on eBay so far.
Source: eBay