The highborn Biribinker is a strange child: raised by bees, he produces the purest nectar, and when he does his great business, confectionery is served in royal society. Everything could go on honeymooning if it weren't for the old wizard Padmanaba. Things go awry when the young, noble, if not exaggeratedly virtuous prince sets off in search of a milkmaid. After various escapades with largely charming elemental spirit ladies (one of whom is transformed into a chamber pot, which the prince happily puts to use) and conversations with a philosophical pumpkin, there is finally a showdown inside a whale. Christoph Martin Wieland's fairy tale, first published in 1764 and embedded in the novel "Die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva" (The Adventures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva), is a masterpiece of comic literature unsurpassed in silliness, whose gallant absurdities would make any magical hero of supposedly fantastic literature cry with shame. With an afterword by comedy expert Michael Glasmeier and illustrated with monotypes by Carola Deye, Wieland's spun art tale is a more than worthy second volume of the "Gespenster-Bibliothek" and suitable for reading at every coffee table in the country. Don't forget the honey confectionery! Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) was a writer, translator, and publicist in enlightened times. He left posterity a vast collection of novels, didactic poems, satires, fairy tales, panegyric poems, and philosophical dialogues. Michael Glasmeier, born in 1951 in Bochum, is a professor of art history at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen, essayist, publicist, and exhibition curator, with numerous publications on art history and the theory and practice of contemporary art.