“Far, far better,” wrote Dorothy Killgallen, “if you have a child, to let him read Nick Carter, William Saroyan, the Wizard of Oz, Tommy Manville’s Diary, or the menu at Lindy’s—anything but such literary baby-talk.”

Actually, most reviewers were charmed by both the writing and the illustrations. Catherine MacKenzie in the New York Times cautiously stated that the familiar style and rhythm of Gertrude Stein were easily accessible to little children, who “if they are not laughed or ridiculed out of it, have a grand time with the sound of words.”

In the New York Herald Tribune, May Lamberton Becker, one of the most discerning reviewers of children’s books, objected only to the pink color of the paper. Recounting a story of some twenty adults who read the book aloud to each other, she concluded: “It was an afternoon of the sort of happiness that cleanses the mind—a child’s happiness.” Refusing to take potshots at Stein by quoting nonsensical lines, she added, “You cannot judge it by extracts any more than you can judge a movie by stills.”

In an article in the New York Times Book Review of November 12, 1939, Ellen Lewis Buell seriously attempted to analyze why the book was so successful: “For a skeptic who never quite finished the first paragraph of Tender Buttons, it is a pleasant duty to report that Miss Stein seems to have found her audience, possibly a larger one than usual, certainly a more appreciative one. As to just why, it would take an expert in the subconscious and a corps of child psychologists fully to determine. Not the intoxication of words which ‘keep tumbling into rhyme,’ as one little girl neatly described it; not the irresistible rhythm of such songs as ‘Bring me bread, bring me butter,’ and ‘Round is around,’ nor the fun which flashes out when least expected, can fully explain its success. Perhaps it is because, in addition to these virtues, Miss Stein has caught within this architectural structure of words which rhyme and rhyme again the essence of certain moods of childhood: the first exploration of one’s own personality, the feeling of a lostness in a world of night skies and mountain peaks, sudden unreasoning emotions and impulses, the preoccupation with vagrant impressions of little things filtering through the mind.

“It is meant to be read aloud, a little at a time, and the adult who does so will find himself saying ‘I remember thinking like this,’ and succumbing to the seductive quality of phrases, which will make it probably the most quotable book of the season. For children, apparently, there is a real fascination in the moods of Rose, pondering over the phenomenon of self—‘would she have been Rose if her name had not been rose’; and in Willie, so sure of his own individuality, and in the lion, which was not blue, who wanders in and out of the chapters with a blithe disregard for the proper chronology. The response to it is as various as it is individual. One child says bluntly, ‘It’s cuckoo crazy’; a six-year-old boy has listened to it a score of times, and one little girl says, ‘I like it because when you start thinking about it you never get anywhere. It just keeps going along.’

“It is printed in blue ink, because that was Rose’s favorite color, on fiercely pink paper, as toothsome-looking as ten-cent store candy. It is hard on the eyes, but to children it is beautiful, and certainly Clement Hurd’s drawings, which translate something of Rose’s own feeling of the vastness of space and infinity into beautifully contrived decorations, are delightful.”

The World Is Round was published in an edition of 3,000 copies, of which one hundred were specially bound and presented in a slipcase and were signed by the author and illustrator. The regular edition was priced at $2.50 and the special copies were $5.00. Bill Scott recognized the potential of having a best seller in The World Is Round, and hired a PR man to handle publicity. Hundreds of review copies were sent out, one to almost every newspaper that had a book column. Notices appeared in newspapers all across America. Enthusiastic salesmen allowed books to go out on consignment, causing Scott to rush mistakenly into a second printing. When copies began to be returned in January, he found himself with more books than he had anticipated. Sales were slow but regular, and eventually the first edition and second printing were sold out and Scott considered the venture a success.

Bill Scott recalled his elation at having a book by Gertrude Stein on his list in only his second year of operation. “The delightful scoundrel we hired to promote the book, Joe Ryle, was a PR man to the life and promised us a few genuine bits of the moon. Whether at his instigation or not, we also had a party at our house to celebrate our getting into the big time. Bruce Bliven came, May Lamberton Becker, children’s book reviewer-in-chief for the Herald Tribune, came, and other celebrities whose names now escape me. Everyone was there but Gertrude and Anne Carroll Moore, awesome head of the children’s room at the New York Public Library. We had already written her off a year earlier when Margaret and I had taken up our first list to get her accolade (she called them ‘truck’).”

Such success had all participants thinking in terms of doing another book together. Gertrude announced she was writing another book for children, called To Do, and that she wanted it illustrated by Clement Hurd in “excitingly sombre” tones, brown and black, like illustrations by Gustave Doré. But To Do lacked the charm and intelligibility of The World Is Round, and after a lengthy correspondence between Stein and McCullough, Scott Books finally rejected the manuscript.

In this excerpt from a letter to Gertrude Stein from John McCullough dated March 25, 1940, he tells of their great hopes for The World Is Round:

I have no recent figures here concerning The World Is Round but there was an unusually large return of books after Christmas. This indicates that booksellers expected to sell more of it than they did and I am afraid the fault is mine. If I hadn’t been trembling so violently in my carpet slippers during our early correspondence I wouldn’t have let you take so high a royalty, for it has nearly strangled all advertizing possibilities—and The World is one of the few children’s books that would have profited by it. [Stein insisted on 15 percent royalty for the first edition. This was later reduced to 10 percent.] Aside from this little dirge, however, the picture is a bright one. We spent considerable effort and care in presenting it to the educational world and such efforts were most rewarding. It was reviewed in those circles with seriousness and penetration.