Aussie artist Andrew Joyner living a surreal Dr Seuss life

South Australian illustrator Andrew Joyner was at his desk when he received an email offering a role in the new Dr Seuss book.

Illustrator Andrew Joyner at the book launch for Dr Seuss's Horse Museum in New York. Picture: David Joshua Ford

When he was a child, South Australian illustrator Andrew Joyner’s favourite Dr Seuss book was Green Eggs and Ham.

He also loved the simple line drawings in Horton Hatches the Egg and the comic energy of The Cat in the Hat.

More than four decades on, Joyner was at his desk in his home studio in the tiny Adelaide Hills town of Strathalbyn when an email landed in his inbox offering the starring role in one of the greatest secrets in the history of children’s literature.

A missing Dr Seuss book had been discovered — and of all the artists in the world, Joyner had been chosen to illustrate it.

He was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement and, for the past 18 months, no one apart from his wife Rebecca knew what he was up to.

This week, he and Rebecca and their two teenage children left Strathalbyn (population 6500) for New York City for the global launch of Dr Seuss’s Horse Museum. Amid appearances on The Today Show and a trip to San Diego to meet the directors of Seuss Publishing in the city Theodor Geisel, aka Dr Seuss, called home, Joyner admits the magnitude of the achievement is just sinking in. “It is pretty weird and kind of hard to process,” Joyner told The Weekend Australian.

“The fact that I was sworn to secrecy helped me get it done so smoothly and without any fuss. It would have been quite debilitating being asked endlessly about how the new Dr Seuss book was coming along.

“It was good working on it as a private project and treating it like any other book, but now that it is out and real, I feel a bit overwrought.”

The origins of the book are as remarkable as its contents. Geisel died in 1991 aged 87. In 2012, his widow Audrey was cleaning out his studio and found a box containing a manuscript and sketches for a book entitled Horse Museum.

There was no date on the sketches but Seuss Publishing, the custodians of Geisel’s work, dates them to the early 1950s.

The book’s central character is a horse who guides a group of children through a museum reproducing depictions of horses in works by major artists such as ­Picasso, Monet, Munch and ­Magritte.

The book was a three-way collaboration between Joyner’s editor at Random House in New York, Alice Jonaitis, and publisher Cathy Goldsmith, who headed the Dr Seuss publishing program at Random House.

“We always wanted Andrew for the book,” Goldsmith said.

“His work pays homage to Ted’s line, and characters and ­energy, but is still uniquely ­Andrew.”