I Saw Esau edited by Iona & Peter Opie, ill. by Maurice Sendak

This afternoon I read through I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book edited by Iona and Peter Opie and illustrated by Maurice Sendak (of Where the Wild Things Are). It's a book full of school yard rhymes, which aren't exactly fairy tales, but they do get passed down from one school class to another, so it caught my attention and I thought others here might be interested as well.

It's an extremely quick read (unless, I suppose, you want to savor each rhyme for a while), and I was surprised at how many of them I knew, or at least how many of them evoked half-remembered snatches of other rhymes. I thought a lot about jump-roping, too.