Artful Anticks

A kitten sets sail across the Atlantic because a cat may look at a king, so surely a kitten may look at a prince.

An ant with more social ambition than provisions invites five score guests to a ball and then sits up all night working out how to feed them. A giraffe is measured. A violet arrives late. And an elf borrows a sleeping dormouse’s toadstool and never gives it back, which is why the world has believed ever since that a mushroom is an elf’s umbrella.

Gathered in 1894 from the pages of The Century Magazine, Artful Anticks collects more than thirty small comic performances built on a single method: take a small creature, give it one entirely human ambition, and follow that ambition with a perfectly straight face until it collapses. Oliver Herford wrote the verse and drew every one of the pictures, and neither half works without the other.

Herford was called the American Oscar Wilde for his talk. This is the book that made the name stick: light verse sharp enough for adults, and charming enough that children took it over anyway.

This Carrier Press Annotated and Illustrated Edition includes:

• All of Herford’s original pen-and-ink drawings, restored from the original edition
• An original Introduction on Herford and the vanished art of light verse
• Notes on the Text explaining the period proverbs and references
• A Reader’s Guide for families and classrooms