By Blanche Fisher Wright
The big yellow book of nearly three hundred nursery rhymes, still carrying the 1916 pictures, the one that's been on family shelves for about four generations.
Nearly three hundred rhymes, from the ones you already have by heart to a great many you've never heard of. Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo-Peep, Wee Willie Winkie running through the town in his nightgown, Sing a Song of Sixpence, the old woman who lived in a shoe, Solomon Grundy getting born on Monday and buried by Sunday, Ding Dong Bell and the cat in the well. Blanche Fisher Wright painted every page of it in 1916 and those are still the pictures, flat and bright and slightly strange, with children dressed the way children dressed then. It's a book to open anywhere. There's no beginning and no end, so you just start wherever the page falls open.
Your child hears these long before they can read a word, and that ear comes first. Rhyme, stress, and rhythm are what a child leans on to break words apart later, and these rhymes drill all three while sounding like nothing but fun. Wright's 1916 pages are also unusually easy for a very small child to read as pictures: one clear scene per rhyme, no clutter. And it's the reference edition. When someone in another book mentions Bo-Peep or Old King Cole, this is where your child met them first.