Some time ago I was looking for old nursery rhyme books on the Library of Congress website, and I ran across a quite interesting one by Carey Milton Bartrug. Mother Goose Safety Rhymes was published in 1940, but the Library of Congress lists it as being in the public domain because the copyright was never renewed. I looked up the author's obituary, and it seems that the copyright was not renewed because Carey Milton Bartrug died in 1952, before the time came to renew it. The Library of Congress people checked for copyright renewal in 2019, but since the beginning of 2023 the author's 1952 death date also qualifies his writing as public domain (though the pictures by Marjorie Peters may still be dependent on the lack of copyright renewal, since there are many women with that name and I have not been able to identify the correct one). His obituary and a picture of his headstone can be found here on the Find a Grave website. He sounds like exactly the sort of person to write nursery rhymes about safety; he was superintendent of schools in Iowa Falls from 1928 until 1945, and then he ran an insurance agency. Besides the nursery rhyme book, he wrote an entire series of workbooks about a character called Safety Sam.
I've chosen a relatively innocuous page from Mother Goose Safety Rhymes to show here; Old Mother Hubbard falls off a chair while getting a bone for her dog, and the helpful moral is given to "Always beware when standing on a chair." Besides standing on chairs, children who read the book are warned against swimming alone, playing with matches, touching loose wires, riding on bicycle handlebars, etc. Some of the pages are scarier than others. Anyway, it tickled my fancy because it's so very... blunt. Me being me, I jumped down a research rabbit hole and discovered that Bartrug and Peters made two more nursery rhyme books, one about health and the other about etiquette. Since the illustrations were done in black and white, I thought it would be fun to turn them into coloring books for my kids.
My Mother Goose Safety Rhymes Coloring Book, My Mother Goose Health Rhymes Coloring Book, and My Mother Goose Etiquette Rhymes Coloring Book (which are all available on Amazon if you click on the links) are formatted with a blank back to each picture. Not only does that prevent the pages from showing through each other, it allows the pictures to be creatively extended by those who are coloring with crayon or colored pencil. Here is an example page from My Mother Goose Safety Rhymes Coloring Book that has been colored by my son. Little Tee Wee has carelessly put himself in danger by going out alone in a small boat and tipping it over, and my four-year-old decided to increase the danger by asking me to draw a shark on the facing blank page. This was a fun, relaxing little project.
