The Twelve Days of Christmas illustrated by Don Daily

 The Twelve Days of Christmas

This is my eleventh post featuring books which either illustrate or build on the poem The Twelve Days of Christmas.  I will have one more post tomorrow with the covers of other books that I have not been able to read but which look interesting. 

I picked up this glorious version by Don Daily at a charity book sale (only $2). Huge thanks to my friend (and fellow book lover) who spotted it among the Christmas books.

Here are some details about Don Daily: "Don Daily (1940-2002) illustrated many classic children's books and anthologies for Courage Books. He also created posters for many films, including The Lone Ranger, The Great Santini, and Roots. Daily's work has appeared in such magazines as Reader's Digest, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping. Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) collected the folktales of Southern African Americans and retold them as classic stories of Uncle Remus, a fictitious old slave who spun stories to a boy from the big house of a plantation." He wrote five books featuring Uncle Remus and his stories of Brer Rabbit and friends. The first, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, was published in 1880."  World of Books

Every illustration in his Twelve Days of Christmas made me smile. I have focused in these posts on the five gold rings. Don Daily has two enormous polar bears balancing, one on a ball and one on a unicycle while juggling the huge gold rings.

Here are the pipers and one of the dancers:

I also need to mention the end papers which are decorated with ordinals - 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on.

I was not familiar with Don Daily but now I am keen to see some of his other work.