Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense - A Selection of Lear's Best Limericks and Illustrations

JM Dent & Sons, London, 1980. Sligh discolouration to dustjacket, otherwise good secondhand condition.

Faithfully reproduced in Colour from the 1870 Edition.

Lear's nonsense books were quite popular during his lifetime, but a rumor developed that Edward Lear was merely a pseudonym, and the books' true author was the man to whom Lear had dedicated the works, his patron the Earl of Derby. Promoters of this rumor offered as evidence the facts that both men were named Edward, and that Lear is an anagram of Earl. The falls of the Kalama, Albania 1851 Lear's nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's 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.