The Folio Book of Children’s Poetry

The Folio Book of Children’s Poetry. London: The Folio Society, 2018. First printing thus. Introduced by Penelope Lively, illustrated by Lesley Barnes. 252 × 191 × 26 mm. Pp. [i–iv] v–xviii, [1–2] 3–173 [174]. Type: Bembo Book with Latin for display. Printed (in oranges, blues, green and black) and bound by L.E.G.O. in full blue cloth blocked in glow-in-the-dark white and gold with a design by Barnes; dark orange endleaves printed in blue. Metallic blue slip case blocked in glow-in-the-dark white on one side. Barnes’s delightful colour illustrations run through the text. Contains 88 poems, from A.E. Housman to Sir Walter Scott. Winner in literature category of the 2019 British Book Design and Production Awards.

Near-fine book with pages clean, bright and tightly bound. In like slipcase with a hint of shelf-wear. The third picture is one from the Folio Society's website to show just how beautiful the glow-in-the-dark features are. 

As Penelope Lively says in her insightful introduction: ‘Children savour language – words, new words, unfamiliar words, challenging words’. The 88 poems in this anthology have been carefully selected to introduce younger readers to the infinite possibilities of language through a broad range of themes, all beautifully illustrated by award-winning artist Lesley Barnes.

Contents include:

• The African Lion - A. E. Housman
• The Arrow and the Song - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Bed in Summer - Robert Louis Stevenson
• A Bird Came Down the Walk - Emily Dickinson
• Casey at the Bat - Ernest Thayer
• Casabianca - Felicia Hemans
• Colour - Christina Rossetti
• Ducks’ Ditty - Kenneth Grahame
• The Despot - E. Nesbit
• The Devil in Texas - Anonymous
• Eletelephony - Laura E. Richards
• Eldorado - Edgar Allan Poe
• Epitaph on a Hare - William Cowper
• The Elf and the Dormouse - Oliver Herford
  The Fairies - William Allingham
• The First Tooth - Charles and Mary Lamb
• Gone - Mary Coleridge
• The Garden Year - Sara Coleridge
• The Hag - Robert Herrick
• Horrible Song - Ted Hughes
• Habits of the Hippopotamus - Arthur Guiterman
• I Saw Esau - Anonymous
• I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth
• I Think I Could Turn and Live with Animals - Walt Whitman
• In Flanders Fields - John McCrae
• The Ivy Green - Charles Dickens
• Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll
• Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Lady of Shalott - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• The Lake Isle of Innisfree - W. B. Yeats
• The Law of the Jungle - Rudyard Kipling
• Leisure - W. H. Davies
• Lines and Squares - A. A. Milne
• Little Fish - D. H. Lawrence
• Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf - Roald Dahl
• London Snow - Robert Bridges
• Little Trotty Wagtail - John Clare
• maggie and milly and molly and may - E. E. Cummings
• Macavity: The Mystery Cat - T. S. Eliot
• Matilda - Hilaire Belloc
• The Migration of the Grey Squirrels - William Howitt
• Monday’s Child - Anonymous
• The Mountain and the Squirrel - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• New Every Morning - Susan Coolidge
• Night Mail - W. H. Auden
• A Night with a Wolf - Bayard Taylor
• Nightmare - W. S. Gilbert
• On the Ning Nang Nong - Spike Milligan
• Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat - Thomas Gray
• The Owl and the Pussy-Cat - Edward Lear
• The Owl - Edward Thomas 
  Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Past, Present, Future - Emily Brontë
• Patience - Harry Graham
• Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins
• The Pied Piper of Hamelin - Robert Browning
• The Railway Children - Seamus Heaney
• Reindeer Report - U. A. Fanthorpe
• The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
• Round About the Cauldron Go - William Shakespeare
• Sea Fever - John Masefield
• Scarborough Fair - Anonymous
• A Scherzo - Dora Greenwell
• Seven Times One - Jean Ingelow
• Sir Smashum Uppe - E. V. Rieu
• Solomon Grundy - Anonymous
• The Song of the Mischievous Dog - Dylan Thomas
• The Spider and the Fly: An Apologue - Mary Howitt
• The Story of Fidgety Philip - Heinrich Hoffmann
• Summer Goes - Russell Hoban
• The Star - Jane Taylor
• The Tale of Custard the Dragon - Ogden Nash
• Tartary - Walter de la Mare
• Timothy Winters - Charles Causley
• There Isn’t Time - Eleanor Farjeon
• To a Baked Fish - Carolyn Wells
• To a Mouse - Robert Burns
• To Autumn - John Keats
• To Every Thing a Season - Ecclesiastes
• True Love - Sir Philip Sidney
• Topsy-Turvy World - William Brighty Rands
• The Tyger - William Blake
• Weathers - Thomas Hardy
• The Wind and the Moon - George MacDonald
• The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies - Anonymous
• Wynken, Blynken, and Nod - Eugene Field
• Young and Old - Charles Kingsley
• Young Lochinvar - Sir Walter Scott