Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium

New York: The Macmillan Copmany, 1921. Hardcover. Very good +. Hardcover. This 1921 tome is dedicated to playtime, holding your invitation to a full 400 games within its pages and forming a "practical guide for the player of games," at any age and for a variety of settings, including schools, playgrounds, gyms, summer camps, adult house parties, country clubs, children's parties, indoors or outdoors, in every season, and at seashore, amidst woodland, or even in snow. The games collected here come from countries around the world, including: the Greek Pebble Chase, the Scotch Keep Moving, the Danish Slipper Slap, the Japanese Crab Race, indigenous North American games of Snow Snake and Rolling Target, the Long Island Chickadee-dee, the New Jersey Hip, and "the poetic game of the little Spanish children about the Moon and Stars, played in the boundaries marked by sunshine and shadow"--as well as more familiar games, like "I Spy," "Simon Says," hide-and-seek, jump rope rhymes, volley ball, and more. This playtime companion is the work of American P.E. pioneer Jessie Hubbell Bancroft (1867-1952), a founder of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education and the only woman to serve as its secretary, as well as the first woman Fellow of the National Academy of Kinesiology. Adding to the fun are many in-text figures illustrating game play, including a frontispiece and 22 monochrome photographic plates of children playing games like "Ring Around the Rosie," the Chinese game "Forcing the City Gates," tether ball and more.

8" X 6". vii, 456pp, plus 7pp appendix. Bound in full burgundy cloth over boards, with vignettes of children at play within a decorative Celtic border stamped in white, blue, and black to upper board, lettered in white to upper board and spine. Mild edgewear to binding, with gentle rubbing and bumping to extremities. Binding is sound and square. Pages are clean and unmarked.