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Dr. Seuss is best known for his allegorical children’s books on themes like protecting the environment, shunning materialism, and embracing multiculturalism. But many people don’t realize that before writing those children’s books, Seuss also worked on commercial art for a pesticide company.

As farmer and author Will Allen noted in his 2007 book The War on Bugs, Seuss also created illustrations for pesticides in the late 1920s. The book’s publisher, Chelsea Green, has made the full chapter of the book available online for a limited time.

Back when Theodor Seuss Geisel was a young cartoonist, Standard Oil-a major player in the petroleum industry that had branched out into making bug sprays-noticed that he’d used their Flit spray guns in several illustrations. Standard decided to hire Seuss to make funny cartoon advertisements, which appeared in national magazines and newspapers. He did work for the company between 1928 and 1943, and “is generally acknowledged to be responsible for greatly popularizing the use of household poisons,” writes Allen.

Certainly no fan of chemicals, he continues:

 Seuss helped America become friendly with poisons; we could laugh at ourselves while we went about poisoning things. In the process, the public grew comfortable with the myth that pesticides were absolutely necessary.