The Treasures of Childhood -“Struwwelpeter”
When looking for inspiration and or themes for the blog I often go to my collection of toy reference books. This morning I rediscovered the book “The Treasures of Childhood” by Iona Robert Opie and Brian Alderson. This is a beautiful book with a lot of color photographs of old toys and I plan to steal (opps -I mean share) excerpts from it often.
Many of the wonderful toys of the past would not meet today’s Toy Safety Standards so I guess they would be called “Collectables” as they do now with reproductions of tin toys …that we have a lot of online at Art Of Toys.
https://artoftoys.com/product/schylling-sparkling-mike-walking-tin-robot/
I was intrigued with the stories of “Struwwelpeter” who was depicted in several scary looking stories which were “funny books for boys and girls” but some look a bit nightmarish. Dr. Heinrich Hoffman wrote in Germany the original story and after the sixth edition a English version was published. The pictures were lithographed and hand-colored in Germany for the English market. In 1973, Peter Opie claimed that fewer than six perfect copies of the first edition were known. The fingernails on Peter are definitely a Freddie Kruger look.
Poem reads:
Just look at him! There he stands,
With his nasty hair and hands,
See his nails are never cut;
They are grim’d as black as soot;
And the sloven, I declare,
Never once has comb’d his hair;
Any thing to me is sweeter
Than to see Shock-headed Peter.
There has been many parodies of Struwwelpeter over the years… including “A Nazi Storybook”. I just discovered a new collection…. how about you?
