Now We Are Six (1961)
by Alan Alexander Milne

Illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard.
First published in 1927, this transcription is of a 1961 American reprint featuring a different layout than the original.

4121142Now We Are Six1961Alan Alexander Milne


NOW

WE ARE SIX


A. A. Milne

NOW WE ARE SIX

Books for Boys and Girls
by A. A. MILNE
with Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard

Winnie-the-Pooh
THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER
When We Were Very Young
Now We Are Six
THE WORLD OF POOH
THE WORLD OF CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
THE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN STORY BOOK

Song-Books from the Poems of A. A. MILNE
with Music by H. FRASER-SIMON

THE POOH SONG BOOK
FOURTEEN SONGS FROM WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG

A. A. Milne

Now We Are Six

with decorations by

Ernest H. Shepard

E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.

Publishers: New York

NOW WE ARE SIX
Copyright, 1927, by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc
Copyright Renewal, 1955, by A. A. Milne
All rights reserved.

Reprinted September 1961
in this completely new format
designed by Warren Chappell

Printed in the United States of America by the
American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York

Introduction

When you are reciting poetry, which is a thing we never do, you find sometimes, just as you are beginning, that Uncle John is still telling Aunt Rose that if he can't find his spectacles he won't be able to hear properly, and does she know where they are; and by the time everybody has stopped looking for them, you are at the last verse, and in another minute they will be saying, "Thank-you, thank-you," without really knowing what it was all about. So, next time, you are more careful; and, just before you begin you say, "Er-h'r'm!" very loudly, which means, "Now then, here we are'; and everybody stops talking and looks at you: which is what you want. So then you get in the way of saying it whenever you are asked to recite . . , and sometimes it is just as well, and sometimes it isn't. . . . And by and by you find yourself saying it without thinking. Well, this bit which I am writing now, called Introduction, is really the er-h'r'm of the book, and I have put it in, partly so as not to take you by surprise, and partly because I can't do without it now. There are some very clever writers who say that it is quite easy not to have an er-h'r'm, but I don't agree with them. I think it is much easier not to have all the rest of the book.

What I want to explain in the Introduction is this. We have been nearly three years writing this book. We began it when we were very young . . . and now we are six. So, of course, bits of it seem rather babyish to us, almost as if they had slipped out of some other book by mistake. On page whatever-it-is there is a thing which is simply three-ish, and when we read it to ourselves just now we said, "Well, well, well," and turned over rather quickly. So we want you to know that the name of the book doesn't mean that this is us being six all the time, but that it is about as far as we've got at present, and we half think of stopping there.

P.S.—Pooh wants us to say that he thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won't mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake.

NOW WE ARE SIX

TO
ANNE DARLINGTON
NOW SHE IS SEVEN
AND
BECAUSE SHE IS
SO
SPESHAL

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1956, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 67 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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