Father Goose's Year Book: Quaint Quacks and Feathered Shafts for Mature Children is a collection of humorous nonsense poetry written by L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books. It was published in 1907.
The book was illustrated by Walter J. Enright; he was the husband of Maginel Wright Enright, the artist who illustrated Baum's The Twinkle Tales (1906), Policeman Bluejay (1907), and L. Frank Baum's Juvenile Speaker (1910).
As its title indicates, Father Goose's Year Book was an attempt to capitalize on the prior success of Father Goose: His Book, the 1899 collaboration between Baum and W. W. Denslow that was the dominant best-seller in children's literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Baum had made similar attempts, with uneven results; The Songs of Father Goose (1900) had been a respectable seller, but other ventures, including a Father Goose Calendar, failed to materialize. The Year Book was a belated version of the calendar: it was a date book with humorous poems and pictures on the left (the verso side of each leaf), faced with blank pages on the right (the recto side) for making notes.
Baum's poems for the collection are similar to his verses in the original Father Goose, but aimed at adults (the "mature children" of the subtitle). The Year Book was described as "the first book for grown-ups by the author of The Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz, etc." Unfortunately, Baum's rhymes in the Year Book are tainted with the racial and ethnic prejudices and stereotypes of his era; indeed, it is this aspect of the book that is most striking to a modern sensibility. This problem of ethics and taste is probably insurmountable for modern readers; it is not surprising that the book was not reprinted in the century after its publication.
(On the question of tolerance versus bias in Baum's canon, see also Daughters of Destiny, Sam Steele's Adventures on Land and Sea, Sky Island, and The Woggle-Bug Book.)
Famous quotes containing the words father, goose, year and/or book:
“Many single parents say that they feel they have to be both a mother and a father to the child. This is impossible, so you may as well rule out that idea.... As a single parent, you cannot be both a man and a woman. Who you are is a parent.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)
“This is the rat
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. The House That Jack Built (l. 4–6)
“Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
—Bible: New Testament St. John the Divine, in Revelation, 20:12.