I have asked several hundred people—they were all ages, children, mothers, and grandmothers—what tales they remember best; and most of them said Mother Goose. We owe this name for our nursery rhymes to an eighteenth-century English bookseller—John Newbery, the first publisher to make something of a specialty of children's books. He lived back before the American Revolution, and one of his many books was among the earliest collections of nursery rhymes, and among the best. It was called Mother Goose's Melody, and it was reprinted again and again for American children, with more and more additions, long after John Newbery was dead and the American Colonies had become the United States of America.

Though the Newbery Award for the most distinguished American children's book of the year is named in honor of John Newbery, not many people know much about him. I enjoyed reading about him and about his author friends and about English life in the seventeen hundreds and the first children's books. There is only one biography of John Newbery, but fortunately he was a good friend of such famous authors as Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, and London literary society in the eighteenth century is very well reported. Much of Dr. Johnson's conversation in this book, for instance, is made up of things he is actually known to have said.

John Newbery's contribution to children's books was important, and there is much information to be found on that. One of the most interesting pieces of literary detective work I have come across is the discussion of Mother Goose's Melody and its probable date and the reasons for thinking that Goldsmith wrote the preface, in the introduction to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Some of Newbery's little books are still in existence. They would seem very quaint to modern children, and yet the best of them—Mother Goose's Melody, for example, which was so well-loved that it survives only in later reprints—are delightful. John Newbery himself was a delightful man, and I hope that this story presents him as I came to know him from his life and works and from the way his friends described him. He was not a genius or a hero, but he must have been one of the nicest ordinary men in a very interesting period of history. And all children who read books owe a great deal to the little London bookseller, John Newbery.

Josephine Blackstock, Forward