Chapbook

Why “Chapbook”

A chapbook was the cheapest thing a bookseller ever sold — a few rough-printed leaves, folded once and hawked door to door by a travelling chapman for a penny. For three centuries it was how ordinary families first met Mother Goose, Jack and the beanstalk, Tom Thumb, and the wonder-tales: nursery rhymes and fairy tales bound together in the same humble paper.

The name fits the app exactly — the same two things, kept together, carefully this time.

Inside the library

Where Hausmärchen keeps the Brothers Grimm, Chapbook keeps everything around them — the rhymes sung over a cradle, the fairy tales from other hands and other countries, the gods and heroes of the old myths, and the storybook verse and prose that joined the canon later. The two libraries share a shelf and never overlap a single tale.

Two ways to read

There is no German and no Victorian translation here; those belong to the Brothers Grimm, next door in Hausmärchen. Chapbook keeps one good reading text for each tale, and a gentler one for the nursery.

Children's Mode

Set a four-digit parent PIN once. With Children's Mode on, the app narrows to the curated Junior shelf and the rest locks behind the PIN. Three wrong tries triggers an escalating cooldown — sixty seconds, then five minutes, fifteen, sixty — the same pattern as the iOS lock screen. The PIN is hashed locally with SHA-256 and a per-install salt; the plaintext is never written to disk.

Chapbook's line is honest rather than sanitised. What it removes is graphic violence — the visceral, on-page detail. What it keeps is the old sorrow these tales were built around: the Little Mermaid still dissolves into sea-foam, the Little Match Girl still freezes, the gallant ship in the old ballad still goes down. Children have always been able to hold a sad ending. The Junior editions carry the same meaning in gentler words; they never pretend a tale ends happily when it does not.

Two painters

Two hands carry the whole collection. Jessica von Braun's original paintings are the heart of it — the studio's featured artist, making new pieces for tales the old masters left unillustrated. Beside them hang the plates Jasmine Becket-Griffith released to the public domain under Creative Commons Zero: luminous, wide-eyed fairy art, gratefully drawn from the library she chose to share.

Thirty-six plates in all. Every illustration is bundled at build time — the app never reaches the network to fetch an image.

What the app does not do

• No accounts. No sign-in. Nothing to forget.
• No analytics. No telemetry. No crash reporters. The app does not know you opened it.
• No ads. No personalization. No recommendation engine — the shelves are hand-ordered.
• No notifications. The app never asks for your attention.
• No runtime network calls, and no tracking across apps or websites. Every tale, illustration, and font is bundled into the build; nothing leaves the device.

How tales surface

Chapbook uses no algorithm to choose what you read. The four shelves follow a hand-set order, and each shelf's tales sit in a fixed sequence. There is no daily-tale notification and no feed — the app never schedules anything or pushes anything to you.

The hero illustration on a tale follows a fixed rule: Jessica von Braun's plate where one exists, otherwise a deterministic per-tale pick that never shifts between launches. No machine-learning model runs — on the device or anywhere else — because there is no server for one to run on.

From the studio

Solocosmo Studios is a small independent studio that makes carefully-finished iOS apps. Chapbook is the nursery companion to Hausmärchen.

Jessica von Braun is the studio's featured artist; her original paintings are the heart of the collection. Every retelling, every Junior edition, every shelf was edited by hand. The collection is finite — you buy the book and the book is yours.