📚 Nursery Rhymes

The oral tradition that outlived its origins: the collectors, and the proposed histories behind every line.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject nursery rhymes in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Sing-song	Christina Georgina Rosetti	1872	22
	The nursery rhyme book	Andrew Lang	1897	20
	The nursery rhymes of England	James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps	1842	19
	The baby's bouquêt	Walter Crane	1878	15
	Nursery rhymes of London town	Eleanor Farjeon	1916	14
	The baby's opera	Walter Crane	1875	13
	Marguerite De Angeli's Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes	Marguerite de Angeli	1954	13
	Quentin Blake's Nursery rhyme book	Quentin Blake	1983	13
	R. Caldecott's picture book	Randolph Caldecott	1879	12
	A history of nursery rhymes	Percy B. Green	1899	11
	The only true Mother Goose melodies	Edward Everett Hale	1905	10
	Potter Beatrix	Beatrix Potter	1985	10
	The Random House Book of Mother Goose	Arnold Lobel	1986	10
	Popular rhymes & nursery tales of England	James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps	1849	9
	Pinafore palace	Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin	1907	9
	Hey diddle diddle & other Mother Goose rhymes	Tomie dePaola	1987	9
	The Real Mother Goose	Rand McNally	1944	8
	Lavender's blue	Kathleen Lines	1954	8
	Come lasses and lads	Randolph Caldecott	1880	6
	Simon's song	Barbara Emberley	1969	6
	Rub-a-dub-dub	Val Biro	1991	6
	Big Fat Hen	Keith Baker	1997	6
	This is the house that Jack built	Simms Taback	2002	6
	Mother Ghost	Rachel Kolar	2018	6
	The Oxford nursery rhyme book	Iona Archibald Opie	1955	5
	The house that Jack built	David Cutts	1979	5
	Whiskers & rhymes	Arnold Lobel	1985	5
	Ring-a-ring o' roses	Raymond Briggs	1962	4
	Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes	Ed Young	1968	4
	Richard Scarry's Mother Goose	Richard Scarry	1973	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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