A Character Sketch of the Book

My book is a modern day version of Heinrich Hoffman's 1845 hit book "Der Stuwwelpeter." The book is basically a series of gruesome cautionary tales for children. I along with generations of children with Germany ancestry grew up hearing these tales, and while I never believed them, they were definitely an interesting part of my childhood.Rather than simply take the book and update the design for 2009 I decided to put a personal spin on the stories as well, hence the title Der Struwwelherrmann. Unlike the original I decided to use photography to illustrate the stories. Rather than find myself models, the photos are a series of self portraits (don't know what I would do without a tripod). To compliment the photos I rewrote the stories as if they had come true in my real life and in my dreams. It is all very weird and twisted, but it gives an new perspective on an old story. It will be interesting to see if people who are familiar with the original interpret it differently than people who are not.

The book is organized very similarly to the original. Each story can act as a stand alone section of the book. Unlike the original book I have included an introduction and conclusion. These set the stage for my personal twist on the story. The intro and conclusion also give one the option to read through the book as a single cohesive narrative rather than just as a bunch of short stories.

Visually the book is an eclectic mix of old and new. It is a small square book which I plan as binding as a hardcover book with glossy dust jacket. I used colors eyedropped from the cover and sepia as my color scheme. The colors add a childish feeling while the sepia adds an old fashioned feel to the very modern photographs. The type also blends old and new. Everything written in German will be in Weiss-Fraktur a blackletter font very similar to the on featured on the cover of the original book, while the English will be in Futura, the font that is used for the text inside the book. Each text page will have a slightly different layout. This is for two reasons. The first being to compensate for vary text lengths. The second reason is to add visual interest. Most pages are just fully bled photos and so I would like to take advantage of the pages that are not. Below are two sample spreads. The first is an example of a spread with text while the second is a spread without.