Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1

About the book

E. W. Cole's collection treats the family book as an almost limitless cabinet of amusement and instruction. Its pages move between comic incidents, poems, puzzles, observations about animals, and earnest arguments about how people ought to live. The author's enthusiasm for Australia and for his Book Arcade repeatedly enters the entertainment, making commercial self-advertisement part of the book's distinctive personality. Laughter and moral improvement are expected to cooperate: playful absurdity can stand beside reflections on education, fashion, religion, or harmful habits. Readers encounter both expansive hopes for human fellowship and the assumptions of the collection's period. The result invites browsing rather than continuous narrative reading, preserving the restless mixture of showmanship, popular learning, and reforming conviction that animates Cole's crowded literary world.

• Popular amusement
• Education and reform
• Bookselling and public culture

Why read it

The miscellany captures an unusually personal vision of what a family bookshop and a family book could offer.

English text of the printing labeled 73rd edition; includes its bibliographical qualification