Audiobook · read by volunteers
More Goops and How Not to Be Them
Frank Gelett Burgess (1866–1951)
Read by Mark F. Smith · 1 chapter · 24 min
About the book
Goops are children who forget their manners, and Gelett Burgess draws them with delight. In More Goops and How Not to Be Them, his second book on the subject, he shows with comic verse and caricatures how not to behave at the table, in public and among friends. Here, a Goop slurps his soup, grabs, interrupts and tells tales, and the rhymes make the lesson memorable while keeping a wicked twinkle. Burgess's drawings do not travel to audio, but his rhymes carry the lesson well, and every parent will recognise the hope behind it. Mark F. Smith reads the selection How to Eat Soup in about twenty-five minutes, a funny and instructive listen for children and parents alike.
Introduction
Frank Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) was an American humorist, artist and poet. He is remembered for a famous nonsense quatrain about a purple cow, and for inventing a number of words that entered the language. In 1900 he published The Goops and How to Be Them, a book of verse and drawings about badly behaved children, and it was an immediate success.
More Goops and How Not to Be Them followed in 1903. It continues the formula of the first volume: short rhymes accompanied by humorous caricatures of children who forget their manners. The tone is light, and instead of lecturing, Burgess lets the comedy do the teaching. Parents of the period welcomed the books as a gentle means of encouraging good behaviour, and the Goops became a minor cultural phenomenon, appearing in later books and in magazines.
This recording is a single section called How to Eat Soup and lasts about twenty-five minutes. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer, Mark F. Smith. Hearing the rhymes aloud brings out their rhythm and their mischievous humour. The material is old, and its notion of manners belongs to another era, but the jokes about children's behaviour are still recognisable. It makes an amusing choice for family listening, and a pleasant introduction to a classic of early twentieth-century children's verse. Burgess's drawings are missing in audio, but his rhymes carry the fun well enough to be enjoyed by children and by adults who remember being told to sit up straight.
Public domain
Frank Gelett Burgess died in 1951: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text