The Charles Addams comic was accompanied by this comment:

The Charles Addams Mother Goose is pretty much what you’d expect, a macabre take on some traditional nursery rhymes. So what I’m wondering is… What’s the market for this thing? Amazon claims it’s for kids between the ages of 4 and 8, but I’m not sure I’d have given my kids this book when they were 4 (and my kids were hardly sheltered; my younger son, when he was 5, asked me to explain to him the difference between murder and manslaughter) — and a kid old enough to deal with Jack Sprat and his wife being portrayed as cannibals, without several episodes of nightmares, probably wouldn’t be caught dead reading a Mother Goose book even with subversive illustrations.

Just for the record, though (speaking of subversive children’s books), every preschooler should own The Z Was Zapped (the link has been updated)— and I’ve personally made sure that most of my nieces and nephews had theirs.