A group of pencil sketches, 77 x 110 to 146 x 196 mm, 1933, including 6 drawn on dinner menus for the Furness Prince (Cruise) Line, 1 on Furness Prince stationery, 1 on both sides of a Copacabana Palace reservation card, and 2 on thin brown sketch paper, some creasing to sketch paper, crease to reservation card, otherwise in fine condition.

A collection of drawings pre-dating the publication of the first Dr. Seuss book by four years, and featuring the kind of fantastical hybrid beasts for which Dr. Seuss would become famous. In 1927, Geisel had begun to submit humorous articles and illustrations to Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, and Liberty, and it was in July of that year that his first cartoon under the name Seuss appeared. In 1937, while returning from an ocean voyage to Europe, the rhythm of the ship's engines inspired the poem that became Geisel's first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
The present earlier drawings were similarly inspired by sea travel. Sketched aboard the cruise ship Southern Prince in 1933 en route to Rio de Janeiro, they bear handwritten titles that hint at Seuss' future work: "A Wild Bidou," "A Pernambuco Cow", "A Wild Nextbestbet," and "Balboa discovering Larchmont."