There was an old person of Ischia, whose conduct grew friskier and friskier; He danced hornpipes and jigs, and ate thousands of figs, That lively old person of Ischia. Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense , originally published in 1845, is an exuberant collection of nonsense limericks, illustrated throughout with Lear's usual sharp eye for the fantastic, the bizarre, and the grotesque. This glorious gallery of Victorian eccentrics is now reproduced in a beautiful, full-color edition that reveals Lear's imagination at its most fertile.