My donkey Benjamin
_-9796.jpg)
Mein Esel Benjamin is a children's photo book by Hans Limmer (* 1926 ; † March 28, 2015 in Rhodes ) published by Hanns Reich Verlag in 1968, with photographs by Lennart Osbeck. The book was translated into several languages, had numerous editions with sales of over two million and is considered a cult book and classic of the genre “Children's book with photography”. The current edition (2017) in the Publisher Fischer Sauerland is the forty-second.
content
_-9797.jpg)
The children's book tells the story of the little girl Susi, who lives with her parents, little sister Angelika and the cat Muschi in a village on the Mediterranean. One day she and her father rescues a donkey foal that has got caught in a crevice. You take the animal home and bottle it up. Susi calls the donkey Benjamin and loves him especially.
Susi wakes up early one morning and discovers that Benjamin has run out of the house. She follows him and the two leave the village. After a while, Susi notices that she has lost her way - she is far from the village and no longer knows the way home. When she cries because of this, the donkey nudges her with its nose, and finally Benjamin leads them back to the village where their family is waiting for them.
Emergence
The author Hans Limmer, born in 1926, emigrated to Greece with his family in 1966 and lived in Lindos on Rhodes , where the story of Susi and Benjamin takes place.
As Susanne Schäfer-Limmer reports in an article, she and her father really found the donkey on the island when she was two years old. Together with the Swedish photographer Lennart Osbeck, who was a friend of Limmer, the idea of turning it into a children's book was born. Susi, her sister Angelika, her mother and the donkey embodied themselves in it. However, the father in the book was not played by Limmer, but by an Australian painter from the artist colony.
layout
Rudolf Paulus Gorbach was responsible for typography and design at Hanns Reich Verlag , who later also designed the early publications on Sesame Street . The book itself has 48 pages plus the flyleaf and cover and is equipped with large black and white photos right through to the bleed . The respective text is set with a sans serif font, partly with generous white space on a single page, partly on a white surface above or next to the photo.
Reviews
To new editions
In a review of the new edition on the occasion of the 40th birthday of the work in 2008, Klaus Nowak said for 1000 and 1 book. The magazine for children's and young people's literature , he found the beginning nice and carefree, but complains with a rather unnostalgic look a "sticky sweetness" in the course of the story and had more of the "involuntary cuddly toy" Benjamin, a "child of the 68s" more "Revolt" expected - after a little stone throwing by the sea, he would return to the idyll of the small family.
expenditure
- German-language editions: Mein Esel Benjamin
- First edition: Hanns Reich Verlag , Munich 1968
- Limited anniversary edition: Sauerländer, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-7941-9157-4
- English editions: My donkey Benjamin
- Hill and Wang, New York 1969 (Translation: Timothy Cleary)
- Angus and Robertson, London 1969
- Harper Collins Publishers Australia, 1969, ISBN 9780207951749
- French edition: Mon âne Benjamin , Hazan, Paris 1970
- Swedish edition: Min åsna Benjamin , Verbum, Stockholm 1971
- Danish edition: With aesel Benjamin , Jespersen og Pio, København 1969
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans Limmer died - boersenblatt.net
- ↑ a b children's book "Mein Esel Benjamin" What became of Susi and her donkey Benjamin? mom.brigitte.de
- ↑ thephotobookmuseum.com, accessed on July 21, 2015 ( Memento of the original from April 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b theguardian.com, accessed November 7, 2017
- ↑ Children's Books - gorbach-gestaltung.de
- ↑ Review by Klaus Nowak (1000 and 1) via biblio.at
- ^ Library of Congress. Copyright Office Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series: 1970: January-June via Google Books
