"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
That's what children chant when they are being teased; it's what their parents chanted, and their grandparents and their great grandparents before them. Collected in this invaluable book are the wit and wisdom of generations of schoolchildren—more than one hundred and seventy rhymes ranging from insults and riddles to tongue twisters, jeers and jump-rope rhymes.
With Iona Opie's introduction and detailed notes and Maurice Sendak's remarkable pictures—vignettes, sequences, and full-page paintings both wickedly funny and comically sad—this book offers knowledge and entertainment to all who open it. Like a collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes or Grimms’ fairy tales, I Saw Esau deserves a place among the classic texts of childhood.