Another amusement

I came across this book a few weeks ago now, and it is annoying me that I cannot remember where. It does not seem to have been the NYRB, the TLS or even the Guardian. Perhaps Amazon thought it was something I should take a look at? It would not be the first time that they have made a very good guess at what I want to read next. Although I actually bought it, second hand for next to nothing, from their Canadian subsidiary Abebooks.

A children's classic from Australia, maybe a decade earlier than the superficially similar effort from A. A. Milne about a bear. Nicely reproduced by Dover, quite good at this sort of thing, at least in my experience.

As is proper with good children's books, and as with Asterix, a lot of the humour is directed at the parents. And a lot more robust than the stuff about perambulators, acorns and strolls in the woods offered by Milne. More Gilbert and Sullivan really.

Very pleased to have made its acquaintance.

PS 1: I now know that Milne was a wannabee mathematician who went to Cambridge on a scholarship, who appears to have left Cambridge as a writer, and who joined up in 1915. Unlike Lindsay who looks to have been old enough and married enough to avoid the first war.

PS 2: I also know that Lindsay was better known as an artist than a writer. A creator of soft porn, impounded from time to time by the US Customs authorities. Sample above.

Reference 1: The Magic Pudding - Norman Lindsay & Norman Lindsay - 1918. Dover reprint thereof of 2006.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lindsay.