Go, Dog. Go!

Go, Dog. Go! (ISBN 0-394-80020-6) is a children's book written by P. D. Eastman (Philip Dey Eastman) and published March 12, 1961 by Random House Books for Young Readers as part of the Beginner Books series, and has been published by a number of different publishers since then.

The book mostly depicts anthropomorphic dogs doing various activities (driving cars, playing baseball, etc.), using colorful pop art-style illustrations and accompanied by short, simple text ("The Blue Dog is out.") What little plot there is consists mostly of a pink dog wearing a series of increasingly outlandish hats and asking another dog each time if he likes them. The other dog does not, until the final hat is revealed at a colorful tree party, accessed by fast cars.

Go, Dog. Go! was the 20th book published under the Beginner Books imprint. A fine copy of the first edition is valued (in 2008) at $360.

The book's authorship is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Dr. Seuss, due to the similarities in style to his writing and both authors being published under the Beginner Books series. The book has been adapted into both a board game and a musical.

Vocabulary

Words are introduced progressively with only 5 or 6 new words appearing on most pages.

The book advertises a 75 word vocabulary. Strictly speaking, there are 76 words in the book, however as the regular noun 'dog' has already been demonstrated to form the plural 'dogs', we can later count the words 'car' and 'cars' as a single new word.

The 75 words used in the book are therefore:

a, again, all, and, are, around, at, big, black, blue, boat, car/cars, day, do, dog, dogs, down, fast, for, get, green, go, going, good-bye, hat, hello, here, hot, house, I, in, is, it, like, light, little, look, my, night, not, now, of, on, one, out, over, party, play, red, sleep, some, stop, sun, that, the, there, they, those, three, time, to, top, tree, two, under, up, water, what, where, white, why, will, work, yellow, you.

The illustrations demonstrate the words well, possibly making the book useful as an aid for teaching English as a second language to adults.

Trivia

A Northern Illinois pop-punk band is named Go! Dog, Go. after the book.