Last Christmas, the Modern Library introduced Christmas Classics, a beautifully packaged seasonal selection for giving and for reading. Mothers shares the successful format of its cousin: a rough front paperback with flaps and a compelling, colorful cover image.

Mothers contains many treasures of mother and child: letters from writers to their mothers; excerpts celebrating motherhood from a cornucopia of sources, from the Bible to D. H. Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Leo Tolstoy, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; nursery rhymes from Mother Goose ("Hush-a-bye, Baby/Daddy is near; /Mamma is a lady, /and that's very clear"); verse from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses; and poetry from such masters as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

This book makes a perfect gift for Mother (a place for inscription is printed inside) and will be a Modern Library Paperback favorite fur many Mother's Days to come.