The Book

The Baby's Bouquet, A Fresh Bunch of Old Rhymes and Tunes, collected and arranged
by Lucy Crane, 1878 illustrated by Walter Crane, cut & printed in colours by Edmund Evans.
This first edition was printed by George Routledge & Sons.
Oblong 8vo. 56pp. Pictorial boards backed with brown cloth. Pictorial end papers in green. 11 full page illustrations by Crane as well as decorative borders and images in all the other pages.
Issued as companion book of The Baby Opera the following Christmas (1878).
The Baby's Bouquet included nursery songs from France, Germany, and England. It was a tremendous success with several hundred thousand copies sold. The designs were more sophisticated than most books designed for children at the time and show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites art and the Arts and Crafts Movement.