Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants Inculcating Many Juvenile Virtues Both By Precept and Example With Ninety Drawings

Burgess, Gelett

Published by J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1928

About this Item

Fine unread condition yellow/gold cloth boards, black front cover lettering and illustrations, and black spine lettering contained in a near fine condition price-clipped illustrated dust jacket. Includes Introduction. Profusely illustrated with black-and-white line drawings. The upper blank first free front endpaper contains a neatly scripted former owner last name. Two small repaired closed tears at the lower jacket spine edge. The jacket is otherwise in fine condition and includes the original Lippincott gold sticker affixed to the center left jacket spine and wrapping around to the rear spine, with the following words: This symbol identifies a Lippincott Longlife Binding and the three worlds "Lippincott Longlife Binding" again repeated twice. Unpaginated. "Gelett Burgess, famous humorist, introduced Goops to the world in 1900 and, since children have the same faults and foibles today, these rhymes are just as funny and useful as ever. May Lamberton Becker in First Adventures in Reading says: "Children have to obey some sort of rules for behavior at home, in school and in society, and the nearer these can come to being as sensible, as generally enforced and as flexible as traffic laws, the better for all concerned. I think the best nursery guide to good manners is still Goops by Gelett Burgess. Their suggestions are as direct as the hearty pokes in the ribs by which children of a large family correct each other's talbe manners. They seem to me to be models in the successful use of a form of correction usually so dangerous it should be well avoided - the use of ridicule, by which more children have been wounded for life than vital statistics will ever set down. But Mr. Burgess's ridicule is directed, not to the child who reads the book, not to any child at all, but against a gelatinous, unlovely race of creatures known at Goops. They have just enough likeness to children to establish points of contact. "Don't be a goop," children still cry to one another, though the book first came out so long ago its first readers are long since grown up. They laugh as they say it, but what they are thus warned against sticks in the mind. The Goop is that lazy lower self against which the higher, stronger self rallies in proper pride. It seems to be a basic book of behavior for very little children, by which a good beginning may be early made." - from the inner jacket flap.

Seller Inventory # 007690

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants Inculcating Many Juvenile Virtues Both By Precept and Example With Ninety Drawings
• Publisher: J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Publication Date: 1928
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Burgess, Gelett
• Printing: 41st Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine