from: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Regular marked price: $19.95Discount Price: $13.57
Cost Savings: $6.38 (32%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 398.8
EAN num: 9780689848742
ISBN number: 0689848749
Label: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 64
Printing Date: September 01, 2002
Publishing house: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Age index: Ages 4-8
Sale Popularity Level: 118380
Studio: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
'Girls and boys,
Come out to play,
The moon does shine
As bright as day.
Come with a hoop,
Come with a call,
Come with a good will,
Or not at all.'
'Addams, master New Yorker cartoonist and black-humour prankster par excellence, has thrown tradition to the winds and taken matters into his own bedeviled hands, transforming those endearing Mother Goose characters into gleefully wicked and outrageous beings -- from the farmer's wife, seen sullenly cutting off the tails of those three blind mice with an electric knife, to Little Miss Muffet, scared half out of her mind by the size and leering grotesqueness of that big spider who sat down beside her.
'That clammy Addams touch never fails to hit its mark. In his macabre, funny way, he has given Mother Goose a dimension even she would shudder at -- but only for a moment, because the wit and candor of it all are too irresistible and insanely comic to take exception to. Addams's style and originality make his tampering with tradition completely and hilariously acceptable.'
-- Chicago Tribune
Amazon.com Review:
New Yorker cartoonist (and creator of the altogether ooky Addams Family characters) Charles Addams tampers with tradition to great effect in The Charles Addams Mother Goose, very first published in 1967, and now reissued as a deluxe edition. While Ms. Goose's original nursery rhymes remain unchanged, Addams casts his spell on a selected few poems with new visual twists. A less wholesome, more anemic Mistress Mary has never been seen, and her bare-lightbulb-lit basement garden of mushrooms and heads of 'pretty maids all in a row' is quite unsettling. Jack Sprat and his wife are, of course, cannibals. Nine-day-old porridge is disgusting... so naturally a witch is the porridge preparer, and goblins are the only ones who would like it 'nine days old.' Humpty Dumpty's story, on the other hand, feels a little cheerier than the original: rather than leaving the egg irreparably broken, the illustrator shows a dinosaur hatching! Tee Addams, Charles Addams's wife, writes an insightful introduction for this lovely, oversized edition, and the book closes with a scrapbook of family photos and pictures of Addams's earlier work. Kids familiar with Mother Goose's rhymes will be delighted (and perhaps only slightly terrified) by Addams's playful interpretations. (All ages) --Karin Snelson
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
its a cool twist to an orginal mother goose stories but with a addams family theme to it
Rated by buyers -
With the recent publication of Random House's, "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life", by Linda H. Davis, rival publishers appear to be looking to their own overstocked warehouses to take advantage of this newest Addams literary craze. At least, that's how I'm interpreting the sudden reappearance of books like Simon and Schuster's, "The Charles Addams Mother Goose", which originally made its republished debut back in 2002, onto our bookstore shelves. Not that I mind, of course. Any republication of the Addams repertoire is fine with me, and had S&S not started sending out this book once again I never would have known what a fine complement C.S.A. made to some of the darker nursery rhymes out there. Mother Goose books come and go, but if you want to go for the memorable, the dark, and the amusing then there really is only one title you should even begin to consider. And it sports a Stephen King by-line on the cover.
Told in about 28 different nursery rhymes, "The Charles Addams Mother Goose" is everything you might expect from that most famous of New Yorker cartoonists. Here you can find all your favorites word-for-word, accompanied by the most peculiar of pictures. The mouse from "Hickory Dickory Dock" takes on enormous proportions. Jack Sprat and his wife seem to have eating habits outside of what we might consider the norm. Even the three blind mice are included, though the carving knife is now of the electric variety. The familiar Addams family characters do indeed make an appearance in some of these poems, and always in a fashion that seems tailour made for them. Plus it takes a kind of genius to be the illustrator who decides that the reason all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again was because out of Humpty hatched a baby dragon/dinosaur/scaly creature. Certainly the unique Addams brand is clear and present in every pic.
Kids who read this book, and there will be quite a few, may find themselves in later years wholly unable to separate Addams' vision from certain peculiar rhymes. Take, for example, that old chestnut "Solomon Grundy". Entirely apart from the fact that his name is now synonymous with a Batman villain, his story here is told in seven/eight panels. "Solomon Grundy, Born on Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday, Took ill on Thursday, Worse on Friday, Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday. This is the end of Solomon Grundy." Addams really takes the poem even further, though. His Grundy resembles a slightly undersized and grumpy Uncle Fester. And once he's, "Died on Saturday", his body resembles nothing so much as a cloud of dirty air. Then, wonderfully inexplicably, that same dirty air is put into a corked bottle and thrown into the sea with the line, "Buried on Sunday." It's this kind of random twist on old stand-bys that gives this collection just the right burst of original peculiarity. I'm not even gonna go into the eyedropper of holy water on the second panel or the mysterious mushrooms that grow out of Solomon's head on Thursday.
So which poem wins the Most Likely To Disturb Already Wary Adults Award? It's a toss-up, to my mind, between "Mistress Mary, quite contrary" and "Wee Willie Winkie". On the outset, neither poem seems particularly dark. In "Mistress Mary" however, an unhealthy waif of a woman with dark-lidded eyes and a lifeless expression waters mushrooms in a darkened basement. Lit only by a single bare lightbulb, the mushrooms have begun to sprout feminine heads, each with the creepy cheer of a babydoll's face. The picture looks almost institutional, what with the pale blond's stare into nothingness and the mushrooms' eerie plastered smiles. Compare that, however, to "Wee Willie Winkie". In that picture a boy and girl stare aghast at a window where a ghoul in a nightcap stares unblinkingly at them, his right hand ah-rapping at the pane. The whole picture is tinted a sickly purple and blue and you've the feeling that the little boy who is not in bed could be in for some trouble soon.
When you get right down to it, however, maybe the most disturbing part of this book is the Foreword written in 2001 by "Mrs. Charles Addams". In this section, the woman gives a bit of context to the original publication. It came out in the midst of Vietnam. It could be credited to two equally possible sources. But Mrs. Addams goes even further and finds in Charles's work an odd source of, of all things, comfort. "How wonderful to find a dinosaur inside Humpty Dumpty, rather than worrying that he had fallen and couldn't be repaired. Or being reassured that the old woman who lived under the hill had all the comforts of a real home and was better for it." You'll note that she makes no mention of the vampiric Doctor Fell who's poem reads, "I do not like thee, Doctor Fell" or the leather-clad specter of death that shakes hand with a little girl by a graveyard. ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
This is a great book. It's a nice mix of the ones we remember as children and a few more we wouldn't readily remember.
This is for the child who has a healthy appreciation for the art of Edward Gorey and the humour for Monty Python and love Lon Chaney. Trust me, there are these children out there, they really are under the age of 8 and they are very hard to buy books for.
What's really wonderful, for the adults who are finding their lives now revolve around reading stories to small children who remain illiterate, this book offers a lovely change from the norm. Honest to god, If I have to read one more Pretty pony story I am going to hunt that pony down....
I recommend it for children of all ages, even if you dont' have your own, it's just so worth having.
Rated by buyers -
In 1973 I was in second grade, and this was my favorite book to check out of the library. The only problem was, it was also a lot of other kids favorite too! I was always on the waiting list for it!!! The illustrations have been in my mind for over 30 years, and several years ago I tried to purchase it, only to find it out of print. I was so excited to find it recently rereleased. I now have my own copy, and am as fascinated by it today, as I was in second grade. The pictures are awesome, and show the true stories at the dark heart of nursery rhymes!!!It's a creepy little safe scare for adults and children alike. A really great book!
Rated by buyers -
As only Chas Addams can do, the innocent nursery rhymes take on new meaning with these wonderfully ghoulish illustrations proving that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. I very first read this book in the bookstore when I was 9 and purchased it with my saved allowance. I still have it and re-read it once per year. Sometimes I wonder if Chas Addams succeeded in capturing the soul of these well known verses better than any illustrator ever has. I recommend you purchase this book, light a fire on a stormy autumn evening and enjoy this book by candlelight with your own little fiends.
Find other books like this one:
