'The Pocket Book of Boners' is Published

The Pocket Book of Boners is a book illustrated by Dr. Seuss, originally published as four separate books in 1931 by The Viking Press.

In 1941, Readers' League of America compiled these four books and published the Complete and Unabridged The Pocket Book of Boners.

Complete and Unabridged The Pocket Book of Boners contains 22 illustrations by Dr. Seuss. The rest of the Complete and Unabridged The Pocket Book of Boners consists of short jokes and humorous observations with most being no more than four lines long.

The Pocket Book of Boners is notable for its early examples of Dr. Seuss' illustration style as well as two stereotyped portrayals of minorities.

The bread-and-butter books of publishers weren’t always the big-name authors, but were instead small collections of previously-available content repackaged for the mass market. 1931’s The Pocket Book of Boners, edited and illustrated by none other than Theodore Geisel himself, had already been selling well before it shipped out to PXs around the world. After it hit the soldier’s outposts, by 1942 it was #4 on Pocket’s Army best-seller list, behind a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! book (also an anthology of previously released material), Nana by Emile Zola (already over 60 years old by that time), and the dictionary.