Oh, the places you’ll go

Providing the art for a lost work by the legendary Dr Seuss is a life highlight for a talented Adelaide illustrator.

Publisher Cathy Goldsmith with author and illustrator Andrew Joyner at the book launch for Dr Seuss's Horse Museum, at Books of Wonder New York.

Illustrator Andrew Joyner has two sheep, a dog, several ducks, lots of chickens and a galah but has never owned a horse. He has now become part of publishing history by illustrating a book about one, all from his studio in his rambling home in the rural Adelaide Hills township of Strathalbyn. For the past 18 months, he has been working in secret on Dr Seuss’s Horse Museum, from the lost manuscript and sketches started in the early 1950s by Theodor Seuss Geisel.

The publication of the missing Seuss book comes from a chance find, and a series of subsequent fortuitous encounters, that led New York-based publisher Random House to track down its artist of choice half a world away in a tiny town in the Adelaide Hills.

Geisel, who in his Dr Seuss alter ego became the doyen of children’s publishing, famed worldwide for books such as The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, died in 1991 at the age of 87.

More than 20 years later his widow, Audrey, was cleaning out his studio at their San Diego home when she found a box. She opened the lid, revealing a dusty manuscript and several weathered sketches featuring a horse talking to a young boy inside a museum. The title on the front of the manuscript was Horse Museum. The box had sat unopened from the early 50s until 2013 and, until its discovery by Audrey Geisel, the idea for what is Dr Seuss’s only work of nonfiction seemed destined to die with him.

The book is a remarkably lateral and sweeping celebration of art itself, with a horse as narrator, leading children through a museum that reproduces images of horses in art history, from Picasso’s Guernica to Pollock’s Wooden Horse, as well as ancient Greek urns and cave paintings in the Dordogne depicting the earliest images of horses.

And it has been illustrated by a 50-year-old Australian artist whose earliest and fondest book memories involve Green Eggs and Ham and Horton Hatches the Egg.

As a kid, Andrew Joyner loved to read and Dr Seuss was one of his favourites. He excelled at school, both at Mannum High School, in the picture-book town of the same name on the Murray River where his father is the town GP, and later in his senior schooling as a boarder at the prestigious St Peter’s College in Adelaide. He got good enough marks to get straight into the coveted medicine course at the University of Adelaide, but opted instead for a law/arts degree.

In the same year Ted Geisel died, Joyner made a wonderful life-altering decision, dropping out of law to concentrate on a PhD in English literature and to spend more time furthering a growing interest in illustrating that he was honing with pocket cartoons and design work at the campus newspaper, On Dit.

Within a couple of years Joyner got his first paid art job — a single pocket cartoon for an article on the now-defunct Bulletin magazine. “It was an auspicious start,” Joyner says, laughing. “The article was about night time bed-wetting in overweight middle-aged men. From memory I got $100. I was just excited to be getting paid for an illustra­tion.”

Joyner quietly abandoned his PhD, supplementing his paltry artist’s income with shifts at legendary Adelaide record store Big Star. His early cartoon work involved simple line drawings and was mostly in black and white, but there was something in his style that attracted the attention of experts. He won the Bill Mitchell Award for emerging artists in 1994, named in honour of the cartoonist from The Australian.

Joyner’s big breakthrough came in 2007, when he illustrated an award-winning book, The Terrible Plop, for Penguin with author Ursula Dubosarsky, showing the Seuss-influenced style that made him the artist of choice for Random House.

But the success as a children’s illustrator is nothing compared with the scale of what has unfolded this past week.

Indeed, his most recent book, The Man With Small Hair by Jane Jolly, was launched last October in the homely confines of the school library at Strathalbyn’s Eastern Fleurieu School, where his wife, Rebecca, is a piano teacher and his teenage children, Will and Charlotte, are students. Rebecca and Charlotte baked biscuits and cakes, Will gave a short speech introducing his dad, and Joyner drew sketches on butchers paper to entertain the crowd of 100-odd students and parents.

This week, Joyner and his family are in New York City, where he appeared on the NBC Today show in Manhattan to promote the Seuss book to an audience of six million.

“It’s all a bit hard to take in,” Joyner says. “From the start of the project, when I first got the email where I had to sign a nondisclosure clause, and then when I was first sent the drawings Ted did for the book, the whole process has been hard to believe.

“At first I felt a bit overwrought that I had been given the project but I quickly set that thought aside. I tried to put the gravity of it out of my mind because it would have interfered with the process of me creating the illustrations. It feels more remarkable now that the book is actually out and it is all real.”

For a book of this magnitude and historic importance, you would assume that Random House in New York and Seuss Publishing in San Diego would have launched a meticulous global search and tested scores of different artists.

The opposite occurred, with Joyner being selected organically and automatically.

Cathy Goldsmith is publisher of Dr Seuss’s Horse Museum and retired earlier this year, shortly before her 70th birthday, after 41 years at Random House. She is also one of the few people still alive who worked up close with Geisel on six of his Dr Seuss books.

“It was 1977 and I was 28 and he was 72,” Goldsmith tells The Weekend Australian. “The first problem I had was that I didn’t know what I was going to call him because in those days you wouldn’t call someone that famous or senior by their first name. Ted could sense my unease, and he took me aside very quietly and said: ‘I will call you Cathy and you will call me Ted, and if you don’t call me Ted, I will call you Little You.’ I didn’t want to be called Little You for the rest of my life, so I started calling him Ted. He was such a remarkable person, so warm and wonderful, and he had a tremendous respect for children. He was an innate teacher.”

Goldsmith first came into contact with Joyner when he re-illustrated an out-of-print children’s book for Random House, The Hair Book, and also was exposed to his work with his hilariously edgy feminist primer The Pink Hat, about the women’s march on Washington against Don­ald Trump, which was denounced as PC garbage on the Outsiders program by Mark Latham.

“It was when I saw The Pink Hat that I saw the thinking side of Andrew,” Goldsmith says. “I knew he could draw, I knew he was excellent at composition, but I hadn’t seen that really deep-thinking side of him, and it was then that I knew he would be perfect for Horse Museum. His pictures just breathe life. We didn’t want the museum to be a dark and dusty place, we wanted it to be a living place that is filled with children, where the art comes alive.”

As he looks back at his work across the past 30 years, Joyner believes the subliminal influence of Dr Seuss made itself felt from his childhood obsessions. But he says the brief and intention for Horse Museum was never to treat it as an exercise in mimicking the master.

“There is only one Dr Seuss,” Joyner says. “But I can see his influence quite clearly on my work. It’s not exactly the same, but it fits within that aesthetic. And Random House were great, they said we want you for you, you’re not here to try to imitate his style.”

The ultimate accolade for the book comes from Dr Seuss Enterprises, the organisation that protects the legacy and work of Geisel, and with whom Joyner and his family are meeting in San Diego this coming week.

“We at Dr Seuss Enterprises couldn’t be more thrilled with how this book turned out,” president Susan Brandt told The Weekend Australian.

“Andrew brought his own unique style while also paying homage to Ted. It’s funny: in doing exactly that — creating art from looking at a manuscript and putting his spin on it — Andrew created his own piece of art in exactly the way the book indicates art is created. This book is as much Andrew Joyner’s creation as it was Ted’s initial idea, and we hope it inspires children all over the world to create their own works of art.”

Andrew Joyner is the brother-in-law of the author of this piece, and we couldn’t be prouder of him.