Animals Are Us: Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature; Celebrating the Peter J. Solomon Collection

24
Charles Addams (American, 1912–1988, illustrator)
The Charles Addams Mother Goose
New York: Windmill Books, 1967
31 x 24 cm
Houghton Library, Typ 970.67.5810
Gift of Daniel Myerson in honor of Melvin R. Seiden,
Class of 1952, 1995
A purveyor of the dark and macabre, cartoonist Charles Addams did
not disappoint with his Mother Goose rhymes. He remained true to the
gruesome details of the beloved texts. In this send-up of “Three Blind
Mice,” the couple replicates the figures from Grant Wood’s American
Gothic (1930), but Addams substitutes a modern electric knife for
amputating the mice’s tails. The albino mice (perhaps from a lab?) wear
round, opaque, wire-rimmed glasses to indicate their blindness.
58