‘On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet–shop. No we didn’t, we never passed it. We always stopped. We lingered outside its rather small window gazing in at the big glass jars full of Bull’s–eyes and Old Fashioned Humbugs…’ One boy was told by his father that rats were made into liquorice. “They wait until they’ve got ten thousand rats…then they dump them all into a huge shiny steel cauldron and boil them up for several hours.” Apparently if the boys ate the liquorice bootlaces from the shop they would catch ‘ratitis.’ “Your teeth become very sharp and pointed… And a short stumpy tail grows out of your back just above your bottom.”‘
Fritz Wegner
The Sweet Shop
ink and watercolour
each signed
Image size: from 9 by 7.5 cm to 9.5 by 9.8 cm
These four drawings appear on pages 284-288 of The Roald Dahl Treasury to illustrate ‘The Sweet-Shop’ from BOY. This lot is accompanied by ink captions on separate sheets.
£250-350