Nursery Rhymes

This book collects traditional English nursery rhymes - short verses of play, threat, nonsense, and domestic life that children have sung for generations. The pieces include falling figures, shepherds, kings, animals in clothes, murdered robins, old women in shoes, and counting-out charms. The rhymes are brief, often violent or mysterious without explanation, and they treat the household, the farm, and the street as a child's map of the world. Paula Rego's images accompany the texts but the literary substance is the inherited verse itself. The volume is an anthology of oral folk poetry, not a continuous story.

Bound in quarter maroon leather and Ann Muir marbled paper boards. Gilt page tops. Mid-blue slipcase with title label.