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:
“My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile:
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile (l. 1–4)
“You can feel it, in a hundred little ways year after year. It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The English Bible—a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)