Struwwelpeter ("Shock-headed Peter") had the distinct ion of being "one the earliest and most successful author-artist books for the very young (Thwaite)." It was a col1ection of cautionary tales in verse by Heinrich Hoffman (18O9-1894), published in German with the author's own illustrations in 1845. Hoffman was a Frankfurt doctor who also superintended a local lunatic asylum. He had a habit of telling stories and sketching in order to calm child patients for whom "the doctor" had been built up into a bugbear. The stories and characters emerged from this practice. The book achieved 100 editions in its first 30 years and countless more since. It was also one of the first to popularize the comparatively new process of chromolithography. Harvey Darton described the collection as one in which the awful warning topples over into helpless laughter, but some have not found the book so amusing. In fact, Struwwelpeter has long oscillated between being accepted as harmless hilarity and being condemned as excessively horrifying, morbid, and even a source of trauma to the sensitive child.
