Plays and Games for Little Folks: Sports of All Sorts, Fireside Fun and Singing Games

New York: McLoughlin Bros, 1900. Hardcover. Good +. Hardcover. The playtime companion skipping rope from the sky-blue Art Nouveau cover joyfully welcomes you in to this oversized book full of fun and games from the turn of the century. Some of the "sports of all sorts" fully described and detailed in these pages are familiar even almost 125 years later. Games like Blind-Man's Bluff and Simon Says, Mother May I and musical chairs are old favorites, and many are stranger, such as "Book-Binder," a hand slapping game, or "Fairy Boats," "one of the pretttiest games of All-Hallow's Eve," along with a great many riddles, puzzles, and singing games with musical scores, like the long-lived "London Bridge" and "Pop Goes the Weasel" or the lesser known, like "Needle's Eye" and "Water, Water, Wild Flowers." This playtime compendium is the work of children's book author and hymn writer Josephine Pollard (1834-1892) and comes filled with sunny three-color toned vignettes and decorations by naturalist and illustrator Ferdinand Schuyler Matthews (1854-1938).

10 3/8" X 8 1/2". 128pp. Bound in sky blue cloth over boards, with Art Nouveau flowers stamped in black and rosy brown bordering a girl stamped in blue and white playing jump rope to upper board, lettered in white to upper board and spine. Moderate wear to binding, with rubbing and bumping to extremities, fraying to head and tail of spine, and corners split and turned in. Slight lean to spine; binding remains sound. Occasional foxing to pages, else clean and unmarked, but for a previous owner's name and their nicely pencilled notes to rear flyleaf, offering instructions for a bonus game to play entitled "Match Tricks" (for those qualified to play with matches!).