Customer Reviews

Chaucer Coloring Book

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As anyone who has shopped through Bellerophon's fascinating catalog has learned, their "coloring books" are often enough targeted at those older than the usual Crayola age. Just as their "Infamous Women" and "Early Composers" titles are text-heavy, delightful reading for older kids or even adults, their Chaucer is primarily text: an inexpensive version of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, with original woodcuts by Caxton and other medieval artists. What would you ever use it for? Bellerophon doesn't care; they just offer it as it is. I used it, accompanied by a good recording of the GP, for introducing my 8-year-old to Middle English. She listened, read along, colored the woodcuts with pencils, and in the course of things memorized several dozen lines of Chaucer and came to love medieval poetry.

Don't hate Bellerophon for doing what they do: which is, producing out-of-the-ordinary, inexpensive "coloring books" for all ages.

This is a great book if the words of Chaucer are important to you--the "coloring" book is filled with text. The pictures are neat in that they're similar to wood-block prints that are contemporary to the period, but they aren't much fun to color, being that they take up a quarter of each page, at best, and aren't very detailed. It would be a great study aid for someone reading The Canterbury Tales, and interesting from a historical enthusiast's viewpoint, but not much fun to color, definitely for an older reader/artist, not really a kids' book.