Youth literature

Dr. Heinrich Hoffman (1809-1894) drew this sketchbook with verse lessons for his three-year-old son as a Christmas present for him in 1844, after having been unable to find any books able to really interest someone of that age in the bookstores in his town of Frankfurt – they were all either too long, too boring, too stodgily moralistic, too full of adult vocabulary or, mostly, all of that together.
He was at the time the psychiatrist at the city’s Institute for the Mentally Ill – this is (…)