Customer Reviews

Original Mother Goose

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book, recognizable with it's checkerboard background in earlier editions, is engaging as a read-aloud book for children far younger than the reccommended 4-8 years. Handy for pre-bedtime use because most poems are short and you can choose to read as many or as few as you have time for. Introduce your child to rhyme and fancy with this must-have staple. (My mom read it to me when I was little, too!)

I recently purchased this book for my new granddaughter and myself. It is beautifully bound in royal purple cloth with gorgeous endpapers and original front page illustrations by Milo Warner. The illustrations throught the book, however, are Blanche Fisher Wright's and they are just as beautiful as the original 1916 ones.

This book contains classics like" Pat-A-Cake, See-Saw, Little Bo-Peep, Little Boy Blue, Humpty Dumpty, Ring Around The Rosy and countless others.

If you would like to share the Original Mother Goose with a child of the next generation or just read it yourself to reminisce your OWN childhood, this is the book for you!

Happy Rhyming and Reading!

Save us from historical revisionists like Ms. Takahashi, who clearly has no idea of the origins of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes or the harsh conditions that existed in England when the rhymes developed. Social class division, beating, and animal cruelty were facts of life. Certainly the subject matter can be a little grisly, but infants don't care -- they love the sing-song quality of the verses. Older children can find in the rhymes a painless introduction to history and a springboard for discussions about why we do things differently today. My grandmother used this book with my mother as an infant in 1922 and used it again with me as an infant in 1957. It is still just as good with our infant daughter today. Mother Goose has become a part of our cultural history. "Updating" the text to reflect modern mores smacks of the kind of historical revisionism carried out by Orwell's Ministry of Truth in "1984."

This is an extremely lavishly illustrated book, with excellent typography, detailed lithograph quality period illustrations, excellent color separation, and wonderful line detail. Many pages of this book are suitable for framing.

The binding is of a quality rarely seen today. This is a work to endure in libraries for generations to come. And this is important.

This edition's careful preparation speaks of the timelessness and endurance of these rhymes and the influence they have had on the English language and the shaping of our collective consciousness in the Anglophone West. In Mother Goose morals manners and conventions are all set to rhyme. For America emerging from a rural British colonial economy into an author of her own destiny is reflected in this world: class division, economic opportunity, luck, affinity with but dominion over animals and nature, and above all, choices. But whysoever could these concepts and these words, presented this way, be important in our day and age? one may ask.

The answer, of course, is as simple as the rhymes themselves, for each illustrates a point of life that ultimately informs dimensions of English Common Law, of which we are all now subject as citizens. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed not to find a single word in this work that is not in "Black's Law Dictionary."

This original Mother Goose edition, coupled with reading aloud to children Shakespeare and the King James Bible prepares them for a mastery of English letters and concepts, and therefore a mastery of life in these United States and even the world, as few other cultural objects could.

Give your children the foundation for the future, and read them The Original Mother Goose, for it captures a voice we seldom hear in this day and age, and prepares them like few other offerings in life of making sense of our language and giving them power latter.

What would the preschool years be without "Hey Diddle Diddle," "Mary had a Little Lamb," and "Humpty Dumpty"? Mother Goose nursery rhymes are part of our cultural heritage. The beautiful, colorplate illustrations in this original, oversized volume will make many of these rhymes especially memorable. Unfortunately, the rhymes are densely packed, with several on each page, and thus the majority do not have accompanying illustrations.

This is a lovely volume at a very attractive price. However, I was disappointed that the illustrations were not as good as I remember. Perhaps in childhood I had a different edition. The colors look somewhat washed out and, while there are many rhymes, there are not many full page illustrations.

I probably had an edition with a much smaller number of the more interesting rhymes with each one illustrated by a very colorful picture. If I had known this volume was not of that type I would not have purchased it.

I have seen photographs of the other available volume, titled, "The Real Mother Goose", and the colors seem to be more vivid. I wish I had known that before.

It is all a matter of taste, of course.

it is a good book and it is an old clasic told 100's of years in the makingi recomend it for your children

My husband picked this book as he wanted a good collection of original nursery rhymes. Overall I quite like it and therefore will start with the pros:
1. The cover is gorgeous and the book itself is quite sturdy with glossy pages, looking like it's going to last.
2. The collection of rhymes is really impressive, with over 300 rhymes, both the quite common and rarer ones.
3. Some of the rhymes contain more verses than in the usual abridged and adapted versions of Mother Goose, e.g. Little Bo-Peep contains 5 instead of the usual 1 and The Queen of hearts 2 verses instead of 1.
Cons:
1. The pages don't have any numbers, so if you want to find a particular rhyme, you're in big trouble. As you can guess, there's no table of content, just a list of rhymes that lists all of them in the chronological and not alphabetical order.
2. As a mother of a 2 and a half year-old child, I wish there were more rhymes illustrated. Some, like 'Lucy Locket' consisting of just 4 lines is followed by a full page illustration, when others like Old Mother Hubbard, the full version of London Bridge, The House that Jack Built, which are all quite long, don't have any. May be that's OK for older kids, but for now my daughter is only interested in reading something that comes with an explanatory picture.
Pros OR cons, depending on how you look at it:
1. The rhymes are original and not adapted, which means some of them written in Middle English, like 'Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk, And I will give thee a gown of silk; A gown of silk and a silver tee, If thou wilt let down thy milk to me'. Some might find these a bit heavy for listening and comprehending.
2. `Original Mother Goose' means that it contains some of those rhymes, that are considered 'cruel' or 'controversial' by some (in which mother whips her little daughter 'for spoiling her nice new clothes', goosey throws down the stairs a man who didn't say his prayers, and the little pony is getting 'whipped ...and slashed'). A noteworthy one is about this woman who had three sons 'Jerry and James and John: Jerry was hanged, James was drowned, John was lost and never was found; And there was an end of her three sons, Jerry and James and John!' I wouldn't read it to ANYONE before going to bed, let alone a little child.
However, nursery rhymes aren't just some verses put together to entertain children. In their unaltered ORIGINAL form they are priceless, from both a historical and sociological point of view. It's up to you to decide from what age your child should be introduced to these valuable and entertaining lessons in history and sociology.

I was in hopes that this book would be like the one I had as a child, but it wasn't. the service was quick and the book is in excellent condition. It'just not the one I was looking for.

From the moment I saw the cover I loved this volume. The book is bound in a beautifully designed cover of rich purple fabric, and metallic gold border around one of the many lovely illustrations by Blanche Eisher Wright. I was searching for a collection of Mother Goose that I hoped would include many rhymes unknown to me; in other words, beyond the common ones. This volume has many! Oh yes there are the well known ones, but many that are new to me.