GERMAN LITERATURE has a long and abiding interest in books for children, and for many years the German Studies Department at Vassar has been drawing on this tradition in its teaching. Courses at all levels have made use of a number of works, especially those produced in the mod-ern era. One example of this is the courses offered by Professor Elliott Schreiber that deal with the Grimms’ fairy tales. In 2023 he taught “Grimms’ Tales and Their Adaptations,” something that was of great interest to the Archives & Special Collections Library, because of our rich holdings on this topic. We were able to connect, and during one class meeting students came to the Library to examine first hand some of our editions. Shortly there-after, we began thinking about the possibility of an exhibition, in order to share the treasures more widely with people in the Vassar community and beyond.

2025 provided a great opportunity to mount an exhibition on the Grimms’ fairy tales. For one thing, it marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of the so-called “kleine Ausgabe” or “Small Edition” of the fairy tales in 1825 (the first “large” edition had appeared in 1812). This “small” edition was important, because it went through many re-printings in the succeeding years, and so was the primary means through which the work of the Grimms was made known in Germany. Coinciding with the anniversary, Professor Schreiber offered in the fall another course, titled “En-during Enchantments: Grimms’ Tales and Their Adaptations.” For this course, students engaged closely with adaptations by different translators, illustrators, and filmmakers. An important part of the course was an engagement with copies of the tales in Special Collections. Working with Mr. Schreiber and me, the students curated the exhibition on view in the Library: the Visions of Wonder: Illustrating Grimms’ Tales across Two Centuries. They selected, researched, and interpreted the books on display, and their names are provided on the list of Curators in this publication. We believe those viewing the show will be impressed with the range of Grimm publications that have appeared since the early nineteenth century, and will learn from the contextual captions produced by the students.

The exhibition was a team project. I’d like to thank Mr. Schreiber for thinking of Special Collections as a resource for the stu-dents in his course, and collaborating on the exhibition, as well as for writing the interesting essay on Maurice Sendak and the Grimms. I’m grateful to the students for their ideas and for cre-ating the exhibition captions. Mark Seidl, the Special Collections cataloguer with an interest in German culture, assisted in making the books accessible and helped to produce this publication. Our colleagues in Digital Scholarship and Technology Services again were helpful; Sharyn Cadogan produced remarkable images of the books for our various uses, and Nicole Scalessa designed an electronic version of the exhibition, which can be found on the Library’s website.