You'd REALLY better watch out: cautionary tales that will curl your hair, too: in Latin, German, English
Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann's Der Struwwelpeter, the best known German children's book, was first published in Frankfurt in 1845. "Shock-Headed Peter" or "Slovenly Peter" (as it is mostly known in English speaking countries) has conquered the children's book market of the world not only with dozens of translations but also literally hundreds of imitations, adaptations, take-offs and parodies. These "merry stories and funny pictures for children between 3 and 6 years," as Dr. Hoffmann termed them, are cautionary tales, by turns macabre, touching, and wickedly funny. Where else does every recalcitrant child or cruel adult get his or her "deserts," and that within a few pages?
Let The Reader Be Forewarned—Not for the Delicately Inclined—One Will Herein Find The Stories Of: - Shock-Headed Peter (crusty kid incarnate) – Cruel Frederick (dog abuser "bites" the dust) – Harriet and the Matches (cat duo predicts pyromaniac girl’s demise) – The Inky Boys (bigoted taunters finally get the tint)* – The Man That Went Out Shooting (twisted rabbit rampage) – Little Suck-A-Thumb (tailor with scissors—enough said) – Augustus, Who Would not Have Any Soup (the perils of the starvation diet) Fidgety Philip (family “quality time” with an antsy pants) – Johnny Head-In-Air (A.D.D. boy takes long walk off short pier) – Flying Robert (puddle-jumper in Poppinsesque flight)
*May not be suitable for classroom use
Special Features
- Stylistically elegant, rhyming Latin translation that is accessible to the non-scholarly reader
- Facing page original German text and popular English translation
- Hoffmann's original illustrations, plus detailed enlargements of them
- Appendix with new, never before published contemporary English translation, Scruffypete, by Ann Elizabeth Wild
- Afterword by Walter Sauer, on the history of the work and its Latin translations
- Select Latin-English glossary
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