IMMEL, Andrew and Brian ALDERSON (co-authors). Tommy Thumb’s Pretty song book: the first collection of English nursery rhymes: a facsimile edition with history and annotations. Los Angeles; The Cotsen Occasional Press. 2013.

Small 4to; original purple cloth lettered in gilt; pp. 121; a commentary on the bibliographical background to Tommy Thumb, illustrated throughout in colour, housed together with three individual 32mo cloth-bound volumes in red, purple and burgundy, lettered in gilt, each a facsimile of the original Tommy Thumb trilogy, “Tommy Thumb’s Song Book”; “Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book Vol. II” and “The Pretty Book” reproduced from the original copies held in the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester Massachusetts; the four volumes housed alongside each other in compartments within a purple cloth-covered solander case, with ribbon-pull, lettered in gilt to spine; as new.

Sole edition of this fascinating bibliographical study and investigation into a lost treasure: one of only 500 copies.

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (Vol. II) is the earliest surviving printed anthology of English nursery verse, published by Mary Cooper in May 1744.  Its forerunner, Vol. I, published earlier the same year, has not survived.  Vol. II  contains about forty individual rhymes, many of which have firmly established themselves in the culture of our nation and are well-known today, for example ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’; ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’; ‘Boys and Girls Come Out to Play’ and ‘Little Tom Tucker’. Only 2 copies of Volume II are known, housed at the British Library and one other (bought for £45,000 in 2001) at the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University.

This compilation set includes a scholarly essay on the bibliography of the publication (including a reconstruction of the lost Volume 1) bound to match three little miniature facsimile books of eighteenth century classics, namely “Tommy Thumb’s Song Book”; “Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book Vol II” and “The Pretty Book’.