Book of Nonsense (Containing Edward Lear’s complete Nonsense Rhymes, Songs, and Stories with the Original Pictures)

Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularized.

Lear's nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes a "diaphanous doorscraper". A "blue Boss-Woss" plunges into "a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of soft mud". His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. His most famous piece of verbal invention, a "runcible spoon" occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries.