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From Solocosmo Studios
Hausmärchen
Brothers Grimm, carefully kept.
Two hundred and forty-five tales — every canonical Märchen, the Children's Legends, and the Lost Tales the Grimms collected then withdrew. Read in German, in Margaret Hunt's 1884 Victorian English, in a careful modern translation, or in a hand-written Junior edition for ages four to twelve. Offline. No accounts. No tracking.
Inside the library
The canonical corpus — 210 numbered Märchen plus the variant KHM 151a and ten Children's Legends — sits alongside 35 paralipomena from the 1812/1815 first editions: the tales the Grimms collected and later set aside, surfaced here as a Lost Tales section. KHM 110 is omitted for its antisemitic stereotypes; the corpus counts 245 because of that single editorial choice.
Four reading variants
Deutsch
The canonical German — 1857 main corpus, 1812/1815 for the paralipomena. Sourced from de.wikisource.org.
Victorian
Margaret Hunt's 1884 English translation, the standard public-domain rendering — formal, exact, sometimes archaic.
Modern
A rules-based modernization of Hunt's text — thou becomes you, the archaic phrasing softens, the cadence keeps.
Junior
Sixty curated tales rewritten for ages four to twelve. Warm, unhurried, plain words; no on-page violence.
Children's Mode
Set a four-digit parent PIN once. With Children's Mode on, the library narrows to the Junior selection, the language toggle disappears, the tab bar hides, the Gallery and Settings lock behind the PIN. Three wrong tries triggers an escalating cooldown — sixty seconds, then five minutes, fifteen, sixty — matching iOS lock-screen behavior. The PIN is hashed locally with SHA-256 and a per-install salt; the plaintext is never written to disk.
This is the whole reason the feature exists: a child can be handed the device unsupervised without slipping into a tale meant for adults. Trust is the product.
Seventeen illustrators
Every public-domain master of the German and English fairy-tale canon, plus three contemporary contributors. Arthur Rackham, Otto Ubbelöhde, Walter Crane, Kay Nielsen, Anne Anderson, Maxfield Parrish, Adrienne Ségur, Carl Offterdinger, Hermann Vogel, Alexander Zick, Robert Anning Bell, Henry Justice Ford, Elenore Plaisted Abbott, Ludwig Emil Grimm, Gustave Doré, Gustaf Tenggren — the canon's whole hand. Jessica von Braun's original watercolours and Jasmine Becket-Griffith's CC0 plates sit alongside them.
Six hundred and sixty plates total. Every illustration 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 library order is hand-curated.
- No runtime network calls. Every tale, illustration, and font is bundled into the build.
- No tracking across apps or websites. No data linked to identity. Nothing leaves the device.
How tales surface
Hausmärchen does not use an algorithm to choose what you read. The Home section grid follows a hand-set display order. Each section's tale list is sorted by KHM number (canonical Grimm numbering). The daily-tale feature, when enabled, selects from a fixed list with a date-seeded pseudo-random pick — the same date always returns the same tale, so the choice is reproducible and inspectable rather than personalized.
The free-tier hero illustration on a tale page also follows a fixed rule: Jessica von Braun's plate if one exists for that tale; otherwise Arthur Rackham's; otherwise a deterministic per-tale pick from the remaining illustrators that never shifts between launches. No machine-learning model runs on-device or on a server to make these choices.
From the studio
Solocosmo Studios is a small independent studio that makes carefully-finished iOS apps. Hausmärchen is the studio's literary line.
Jessica von Braun is the studio's featured artist; her original watercolours sit among the seventeen illustrators. Hausmärchen was edited by hand — every synopsis, every Junior rewrite, every section heading. There is no AI assistant choosing what you see. The corpus is finite. The Grimms finished writing in 1857. You buy the book and the book is yours.