Fairytale Scrapsheets

Fairy tales are one of the themes collectors search for most on this site. Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots all appear on scrapsheets, often as a whole story told across one sheet. The archive holds about 250 fairytale sheets from more than forty publishers, and some of them are for sale.

Fairytale scraps from Victorian Germany to the DDR

The oldest fairytale sheets in the collection come from Berlin, where Littauer & Boysen, Wolf Hagelberg and E.A. Schwerdtfeger printed chromolithographed die-cut scraps in the late nineteenth century. Raphael Tuck & Sons in London had its sheets printed in Germany too. After the war the tradition carried on: Planet Verlag in East Berlin printed fairytale sheets until the 1980s, Schultze-Wittenborg did so in West Germany, and Fher in Bilbao and Saga in Trondheim made their own versions. Mamelok Press in England published many fairytale sheets from the 1960s, both new designs and reprints of Victorian ones.

How to find a fairytale sheet

Search the scrapsheets for "fairytale", or for the name of a tale, and narrow the results by producer, country or period. Tick "For sale" to see only the sheets you can order. If you are looking for one particular sheet, the producer pages show the logos printed on the ladders between the scraps, which helps you identify and date it.