Every child knows the stories of the most famous of all fools, who bakes owls and monkeys, teaches a donkey how to read and fools the Count of Anhalt. His owl mirrors, his penetrating literalism and his deliberate misunderstandings, with which he keeps masters and masters at bay, are proverbial. But not only the powerful are the victims of his crude jokes, but also poor farmers and craftsmen, animals and children. In Clemens J. Setz's retellings of selected histories from the popular Volksbuch, Till Eulenspiegel, "perhaps the freest figure in German literature", donates nothing but unrest and chaos in the villages and houses of the good, decent people, for the thieving pleasure of the reader, beautifully background-illustrated by Philip Waechter.