Edward Lear Books

Maldwin Drummond is a sailor and a farmer who got an idea. He cruised under sail with the specific goal of following in the wake of artist and nonsense poetry writer Edward Lear (1812-1888) The result is "After You Mr. Lear: In The Wake Of Edward Lear In Italy" which relates Maldwin Drummond's nautical and land-based adventures as a result of his unusual quest. Profusely illustrated with cartoons, paintings, photos, and maps, "After You Mr. Lear" is an intrinsically interested account of a modern-day cruise which was embarked upon as a voyage of discovery to the appreciation of armchair travelers and land-bound sailors. Drummond's deftly written accounts of leaving from the Isle of Wight aboard his yacht 'Gang Warily" and crossing the English Channel, then navigating the rivers and canals of France all the way to the Mediterranean, then sailing down the coast of Italy from the Rivera to Naples, then going inland to Campania, Basilicata, Sicily, and Calabria, will hold the reader's rapt attention from first page to last. "After You Mr. Lear" is a highly recommended addition to personal reading lists and community library collections.

I got this book out of my library to see if I could get some ideas about what postmodernism might mean to a professional stnad-up comic. The book is itself very funny in places. He accuses the professional philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jaques Lacan of having been Maoist, and claims that Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard were not. I remember those people from a critical theory class I took from this professor ten years ago when he was saying the same thing.

Olson is always sort of idiosyncratic. He wore a cowboy hat and a paisley shirt to classes.

His boots were pink.

The book he has written here is also idiosyncratic. He mixes weird stuff: like Hegel and Wodehouse in one chapter, and ancient Greek philosophy and modern mystery stories in another chapter. It was fun to see him go in depth.

The basis for humor, as he once pointed out in a class, was that you take two conflicting schemas, two completely opposite ideas, and have them make love. Their boundaries tickle. It's like omparing motorcycles and oranges. There is always a way to do it. Goosebumps, they both roll, they both smell good, and so on, until you get a productive comparison that makes you laugh. Olson keeps working until he gets it.

Olson is doing that through this whole book. It's a hard thing to sustain because it can get so complex that it falls into apostasy. But that's where comedians should be headed. This is sit-down comedy, though. Sit down, and think about it.

I should maybe try to ompare apples and speedboats.

The Complete Book of Nonsense by Lear is a broad compilation of Limericks, Poems, Ballads and other forms which celebrates the fantasy world of the child. Lear creates simple visions of exaggeration with a man's beard so large as to have birds nesting in it, or some one who's legs were so long as to leap from Turkey to France in one prance. Included also are a number of love stories or stories of devotion such as the exquisite "The Owl and the Pussycat" who went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat.

It is a book which does not make any attempt to cram a moral into a child's mind or teach facts. It makes it's appeal directly to the child's curiosity and fantasy world, illustrated with a unique and charmingly naive yet sophisticated pen and ink drawing style, it delivers enchantment and will fascinate. He speaks their language.

Edward Lear was born in 1812 and died in 1888.
He was a man of immense talents.He wrote poems and was a master of writing Nonsense Verse amd Limericks. He also excelled at at, and painted magnificent birds. He was an art instructor to Queen Victoria.He illustrated books for others and made simple line illustrations for his poems.I have other books of his poems that have illustrations done by others . One ,for instance, is "The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear" illustrated by John Vernon Lord. His intrepretation of Lear's poems are line drawings,but far more complicated and detailed.
In this book of Mazes, Giles Brandreth and David Farris take 30 of Lear's Nonsense Rhymes and Limericks; and with David Farris doing the line drawing intrepretation,I presume, and Gyles Branderth constructing mazes within them; they have produced a whole different approach to Lear's verses ;while at the same time combining them with excellent mazes for puzzle enthusiasts,In case you would like to compare these drawings with Lear's,a simple search of the Net under Edward Lear will give you his original illustrations.
When you see the differences,you won't be able to but wonder what the "Great Master" would have to say. I bet it would make for a good Limerick!
Anyway,this little gem is a whole lot of fun;and wasn't that just what Lear was all about?

"There was an old man in a barge,
Whose nose was exceedingly large;
But in fishing by night,
It supported a light,
Which helped that old man in a barge.

Although this book is out of print,it is readily available as a used book.

Though Wines is renowned for architecture, his illustrations for Lear are emphatic of his talents as an artist; these are a combination of the beautiful line and sensuous watercolor qualities of Arthur Rackham crossed with the avant-garde and perverse sensibilities of Edward Gorey. An intriguing perspective on the poems of Edward Lear. Lear himself must have applauded if he'd had the chance. Provocative for adults, yet children will be tickled by it. Nice gift book. The title makes it suitable for all sorts of occasions.

Nonsense verse done well has a charm unlike anything else. It is generally funny and the best contains subtle meanings that must be plucked from the froth like the best berries from a tangled briar patch. This book can be described using those terms. The illustrations are childlike, yet the verse is very adult. There is talk of going to sea in a sieve.
The names of the three poems are:

*) How pleasant to know Mr. Lear
*) The jumblies
*) The dong with a luminous nose
*) The scroobius pip

If you want to snicker and be forced to think a bit before you get it, this book is for you.

An excellent cd. Even the 1973 reprint of the book fetches over £500 these days so the cd is particularly welcome.

I found the colour and reproduction to be first class throughout.

To be reccommended

John Whitaker,

This is a nonsense story written by Edward Lear, who was a landscape painter in the early 1800's. He taught Queen Victoria how to do watercolor paintings, and in 1847, he published a nonsense rhyme book that became well-loved and quite famous. Lear became more famous for his book than he was for his paintings. This is a nonsense rhyme about a bunch of silly people who go to sea in a sieve and what they do when the water comes in and what they do when they reach some land. What makes this book so fun is the beautiful ink drawings by Edward Gorey. I think that the illustrations make this book a piece of art in itself. They are also quite entertaining.

The overriding mechanism of the play is an image, a radiantly English image, of society as a mechanism or consuming beast, it consumes Cordelia as head of state, it destroys Lear as contrary to its purposes. He gives the simple understanding of the situation in the great third act: "If a God had made the world, might would always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world--out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad."

He's mad, of course, or call this a moment of lucidity before the end. Within the structure, Bond skillfully handles material from Kafka ("The Great Wall of China") and Frost ("Mending Wall"), tending toward Eliot's "Marina" in Act Two. The writing is sparse, the action is dramatic, until Act Three blooms into Lear's parable, Kafka by way of Charles M. Jones: "A man woke up one morning and found he'd lost his voice. So he went to look for it, and when he came to the wood there was the bird who'd stolen it. It was singing beautifully and the man said `Now I sing so beautifully I shall be rich and famous'. He put the bird in a cage and said, `When I open my mouth wide you must sing'. Then he went to the king and said, `I will sing your majesty's praises'. But when he opened his mouth the bird could only groan and cry because it was in a cage, and the king had the man whipped. The man took the bird home, but his family couldn't stand the bird's groaning and crying and they left him. So in the end the man took the bird back to the wood and let it out of the cage. But the man believed the king had treated him unjustly and he kept saying to himself `The king's a fool' and as the bird still had the man's voice it kept singing this all over the wood and soon the other birds learned it. The next time the king went hunting he was surprised to hear all the birds singing `The king's a fool'. He caught the bird who'd started it and pulled out its feathers, broke its wings and nailed it to a branch as a warning to all the other birds. The forest was silent. And just as the bird had the man's voice the man now had the bird's pain. He ran round silently waving his head and stamping his feet, and he was locked up for the rest of his life in a cage."

Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed by such a commentator. The Bard in this bleak, warlike world makes himself known by an untoward cruelty or a jest for groundlings, in a line or two. Gunplay replaces the swordfight. The main point of departure is the rapprochement of Cordelia and Lear, who sit as spies on the whole lot in indeterminate time and space.

The Author's Preface argues in Bond's voice the image of the play, and reveals an eye for "the caricatures that pass for strength in our society--the hysterical old maids who become sergeant majors, the disguised peeping Toms who become moralists, the immature social misfits who become judges."

The Royal Court Theatre was able to mount the play in 1972 with a large cast, and Harry Andrews as Lear. The Royal Court is not what it was, Bond is out, and the Guardian headlined a 2000 interview with him (saying the very same things), "Still bolshie after all these years" (the subhead is "Playwright Edward Bond tells Brian Logan why he knows better than Sam Mendes, Trevor Nunn and the rest of theatre's A-list").

Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (12/06)

Michael Montgomery's "Lear's Italy" is like a time travel machine - it transports the reader into a world both really familiar and really foreign at the same time. His narrative of Edward Lear's life and travel in Italy from 1837 to 1888 is heavily supported by excerpts from Lear's letters, diaries and travelogues and complemented by numerous small sketches made by Lear during his time in Italy.

Edward Lear was one of the leading artists of the Victorian era, best known for his work "The Book of Nonsense." An accomplished writer and illustrator, he moved to Italy at the age of 25 and he spent most of his life there apart from a period during the `Risorgimento' (Italian unification). He died in 1888 and was buried in San Remo. His work and travels took him to some of the best known places in Italy as well as into some of the most remote ones. He often traveled on foot or on horseback, interacting with local people and later describing them, their customs and their land in great detail. Some of the descriptions read like they were written yesterday, such as this charming description of his stay in Rapallo, a `dirty and dull place': "Poste Hotel - ill-tempered hostess, particularly filthy room & nasty house. Ordered dinner& went out with G., but it rained, & I could hardly do anything. Bay of Rapallo dead & shut up. Women make lace. All is contrast to the La Spezia province. Dinner not very bad. Then insisted on, & got, a better room, & came to bed at 8. No sleep; fleas, bugs, gnats, ants, noisy geese, fidgety sea, lightning all night, crying child, & all sorts of disturbances..." If you've traveled some, I am certain that this description - well, maybe without the fleas - could have described many a hotel stay you have had; yet it was written in 1860's.

And another one, which really made me smile, this time talking about his dislike for Venice: "Now, as you will ask me my impressions of Venice, I may as well shock you a good thumping shock at once by saying I don't care a bit for it & never wish to see it again... Canaletto's pictures please me far better, inasmuch as I cannot in them smell these most stinking canals. Ugh!" Whereas I love Venice greatly and can not agree with Lear on his dislike of it, the smelly canals there have not improved since his visit in the late 1860's.

Other parts of Italy pleased Lear far more, as is clearly evident from this vivid description of Lake Varese, visited shortly after Lear's stay in Venice: "Those beautiful bright villas - those beautiful scenes, with the Lake below! And, spite of its small repute as an Italian Lake, Varese has some qualities wanting to all the rest: its endless delicate gradation of multiplicity of verdure - slopes of green - & far away bits of level mixed with shining water - long lines of distant blue plain - deep or faint, & grade beyond grade of more faintly delineated soft hills or more decided ridges, with Alpine snow above... the tall Lombard towers (their bells so fine in tone) - the rich green of the walnut, the almost yellow acacia - the grey willows, olives, poplars or aspens - the thick oak copses, where nightingales sing always - the smooth undulation & declivities of turf - the cheerful hayfields, the many winding paths - the glittering villages, & single silvery villas or cottages or chapels - the winding bright streamlets - fig, almond, pomegranate, corn, mulberry for foreground - who would not rejoice in the landscape of Lake Varese?"

If you are looking for a book with a strong plot and a fast moving, exciting story, "Lear's Italy" will not be your cup of tea. If, on the other hand, you are one of those people who love good writing for its sake alone, if you can close your eyes and see Lake Varese clearly after reading Lear's description of it, then I bet this book will be a great delight to you. I would gladly recommend it to dreamers, artists, travelers and armchair travelers everywhere.