Nonsense Books

Before Dr. Seuss, before Lewis Carroll, there was Edward Lear, and he was stranger than them all. In 1846, an illustrator and ornithological sketch-artist published a small book of absurd five-line verses about impossible people in impossible predicaments, and accidentally invented the modern limerick along with an entire genre of literature. This collection gathers the whole dreamlike catalogue: the Owl and the Pussy-Cat sailing off to sea with honey and money, the Pobble who has no toes, the Dong with the luminous nose, old men who eat vast quantities of rice and young ladies in bewildering situations. Each verse follows rigorous rules while describing things that cannot exist, a paradox at the heart of Lear's genius. His own drawings, wonderfully awkward and strangely moving, amplify the verbal absurdity into something irreducibly strange. This is not children's literature dressed up for adults or vice versa. It exists in a third space, where logic dissolves and joy takes over. For anyone who has ever suspected that the world makes slightly less sense than it pretends to.