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. Consequently, our sale has been steady and from perennial sources so that it looks to continue so for years.

There seems an increasing and spreading awareness that it is a great book and from all sides we hear reports of its effect on children. Miss Davis at the Public Library says that it has stimulated a great deal of children’s writing and she has a thick stack of pictures that it has provoked, particularly of the garden chair. The more it releases and relaxes others, the more it inhibits us with the heavy responsibility of having published a masterpiece.

When Gertrude Stein selected Clement Hurd to illustrate The World Is Round, he had barely begun his career as a book illustrator. Born and brought up in New York City, he graduated from Yale University in 1930. After a year at the Yale Architectural School, he went to Paris, where he studied painting in the studio of Fernand Léger.

The Depression ended Clement Hurd’s studies in 1933 and brought him back to New York to seek work as a freelance artist. Margaret Brown saw his murals for a bath house in Greenwich, Connecticut, that humorously depicted swimmers being attacked by smiling sharks and young ladies being pinched by happy men. To Margaret’s discerning eye they showed a clean, almost French style, well suited to book illustration. She suggested that he enter the field of children’s books.

Hurd and Brown started a collaboration that lasted many years. Their first effort, Bumble Bugs and Elephants, published by Scott Books in 1938, was termed by Lucy Sprague Mitchell as “the youngest book I have ever seen.” After spending three years of military duty in the South Pacific during the war, Hurd continued his work with Margaret Brown, and they completed the universal favorite, The Runaway Bunny, and the phenomenal bestseller, Goodnight, Moon. Hurd went on to produce books with other writers as well. After our marriage in 1939, Clem and I wrote and illustrated children’s books together for over forty years.

Long after The World Is Round disappeared from bookstores, the participants in the project felt they had been involved in something unusual and important. In 1965 Bill Scott and Clement Hurd were working together on another publication. One day over lunch Scott declared that of all the books he had issued, he thought that The World Is Round was the one most likely to become a permanent part of American literature. He said that if he had it to do again, he would ignore Stein’s suggestion of blue on pink and use conventional black ink for the type on white paper. Hurd observed that to him his illustrations had always seemed somewhat unfinished, and that were he able, he would do them differently, carrying them one step further. Together they decided a second edition was called for—with a new format, a different typeface, and new illustrations.

Hurd kept his original conception of the pictures but recut them in wood and linoleum blocks.