 According to Judith and Neil Morgan, the book sold well immediately. The trade edition initially sold an average of 12,000 copies a month, a figure which rose rapidly. Bullock's department store in Los Angeles, California, sold out of its first, 100-copy order of the book in a day and quickly reordered 250 more. The Morgans attribute these sales numbers to "playground word-of-mouth", asserting that children heard about the book from their friends and nagged their parents to buy it for them. However, Houghton Mifflin's school edition did not sell as well. As Geisel noted in Jonathan Cott's 1983 profile of him, "Houghton Mifflin ... had trouble selling it to the schools; there were a lot of Dick and Jane devotees, and my book was considered too fresh and irreverent. But Bennett Cerf at Random House had asked for trade rights, and it just took off in the bookstores." Geisel told the Morgans, "Parents understood better than school people the necessity for this kind of reader."
