The Space Child's Mother Goose. (1958)

I had bought this book online thinking this would be the perfect gift for my best friend and her husband, newly minted parents. I had visions of them reading this to my goddaughter when she was older. When I got the book in the mail, however, it became apparent after flipping through the first few pages that when Alex was old enough to understand the poems, she would be more than able to read them to herself. So I'm keeping it until then (we'll see if I can still find it...).
While the verse was very witty and the illustrations were cute, I found I couldn't really like the book as much as I felt I should. Maybe it's because I'm very picky about my poetry. Maybe it was because of my preconception this was a children's book. ( )

One day in the 1950s a retired architect started combining a lifetime of light verse with modern science fiction. The resulting rhymes and ditties were not only silly, they were also entirely based on philosophy and science, this being mainly Einsteinian and quantum physics and mathematics. The author himself, alas, did not make it through the year in which this book was published but the book remained a cult classic into the 21st century. The illustrator carried the torch for the next 50 years ensuring that the book would not be forgotten. She was, in fact, responsible for much of the love and craft that had gone into it so it is less an intellectual exercise and more a complete work of art.

Mother Goose is the sort of book that I love to give as a gift because my friends are just the sort of people who can appreciate the absurdity and get the references. This book is whimsy elevated to absolute genius. ( )

I don't even understand a small fraction of the physics behind this delightful book, but love the idea of spacers reading it to their children in harness just before tranking for the jump. ( )

I first saw this book when a friend of mine who was a physicist for NASA lent it to me. It has been a favorite, and my son loved it dearly.
I recently bought another copy and it's unchanged.

Very cute book, and an interesting document of the 1950's. ( )