Another Child's Garden of Verses

Remember all our copies of A Child's Garden of Verses?

We picked up another one at the library sale last weekend. This one is also from the 1970's and it's illustrated by Erik Blegvad. But I can't find an online picture, so I guess we'll have to take our own. I can't even find a good website that shows a lot of Blegvad's illustrations (you have to search by "Eric" as well as "Erik" to find much). But he illustrated piles of picture books along with the Miss Bianca series and The Gammage Cup, so it's not hard to find something that shows his style.

This version is not all that exciting, maybe, but it's very nice, if that makes sense. It includes 24 of the poems, with pictures of children in Victorian clothes (lots of sailor hats). The one we like best is for "Pirate Story." It shows three children in a basket in the middle of a huge field of waving grass; it's perfect for "And waves are on the meadows like the waves there are at sea." Crayons is fascinated by their Jolly Roger flag attached to an upside-down broom in the basket; she wants to know where they got the flag, how they're keeping it upright (she figured out that one of the children is holding on to it), and how they attached the flag to the broomstick (and if they've permanently destroyed the broom: should I be worried about our cleaning tools now?)). The only issue I have with that picture is that the text is hard to read in the middle of all that grass; but the other pages in the book don't have the problem.

I still like some of our others better, but this one, even though it again doesn't have a large selection of the poems, is a good one to get started with.