Young Reader's Series: Book of Nonsense (Containing Edward Lear's Complete Nonsense Rhymes Songs and Stories)

Edward Lear was an English artist illustrator author and poet renowned for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks a form that he popularized. Lears nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poets delight in the sounds of words both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes a diaphanous doorscraper. A blue Boss-Woss plunges into a perpendicular spicular orbicular quadrangular circular depth of soft mud. His heroes are Quangle-Wangles Pobbles and Jumblies. His most famous piece of verbal invention a runcible spoon occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat and is now found in many English dictionaries. Reviews Surely the most beneficent and innocent of all books yet produced is the Book of Nonsense with its corollary carols inimitable and refreshing and perfect in rhythm. I really dont know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors. -JOHN RUSKIN In the List of the Best Hundred Authors. A magic song-writer with something like a reverence for the absurd. - Times Literary Supplement