I think that translates approximately to 'Nutcracker and the Sugar Fairies'. My guess is that it was inspired by ETA Hoffman's 1816 story, 'Nußknacker und Mausekönig' (‘Nutcracker and Mouse King’) which was the basis for Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite [1892].
My rule of thumb when wading through the >500 childrens books online at Braunschweig University is to basically disregard books longer than 100 pages because inevitably the illustrations are not so good. The shorter the book the better the quality, in my experience.
Perhaps 1/4 of their online stock overall has substantial age related damage and/or was poorly digitized. All of the images above (uploaded at full size) were touched up to one extent or another. That still leaves a large body of (mostly) 19th century childrens books from which to sample.
The above images represent a good cross section in terms of illustration and printing styles and although the majority of titles are in german, there are quite a few books from the well known English illustrators such as Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane. No doubt I will raid their holdings again in the future.
Previous childrens books entries.
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