The Chas Addams Mother Goose. [first edition]

Fans of the Addams Family creator and New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams are sure to savor the deliciously twisted take on nursery rhymes in The Chas Addams Mother Goose. First issued in 1967, the work trumps tradition, spicing up the original verse with offbeat illustrations. While Ms. Goose's original nursery rhymes remain unchanged, Addams casts his spell on a selected few poems with new visual twists. For "Rain, Rain, go away, Come again another day," Addams imagines a flood of apocalyptic proportions taking over Manhattan, leaving a small family adrift on a rooftop and the Statue of Liberty submerged. A less wholesome, more anemic Mistress Mary has never been seen, and her bare-lightbulb-lit basement garden of mushrooms and heads of "pretty maids all in a row" is quite unsettling. Jack Sprat and his wife are, of course, cannibals. Nine-day-old porridge is disgusting... so naturally a witch is the porridge preparer, and goblins are the only ones who would like it "nine days old." Humpty Dumpty's story, on the other hand, feels a little cheerier than the original: rather than leaving the egg irreparably broken, the illustrator shows a dinosaur hatching! For all ages.