You are a human animal. You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal. Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm here today, well, with two of my favorite people, one of whom I know very well and one of

whom I know only as a reader, but I'm happy to have both of them.

It's Iona Opie and Maurice Sendak.

Together, they have worked on I Saw Esau.

I Saw Esau was the first book that Iona Opie collected with her husband, Peter.

They are the preeminent historian, folklorists of children's games and literature and expression.

Maurice Sendak is the great illustrator.

This is a book of children's street rhymes,

so it's, what would you say, a kind of scattier thing

than you expect from either Iona or Maurice.

These are the rhymes that are the creepy, crawly ones that people use in the schoolyard

when no one's looking, as Iona says in her introduction, the rhymes you did not hear at your

grandmother's knee.

Can you tell about how you started to collect these?

By accident, everything in life seems to happen by accident.

We were supposed to be assembling and very seriously studying the histories of nursery rhymes,

and we used a lot of letters to the paper and

correspondence who arrived people sent us in rhymes. And some of these rhymes were obviously not the

sort of thing that Granny would like to soothe the smallest child with, but they were much more rumbustious, tough and rough, and some of

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