‘Kort en Klein’ (Short and Small) is a collection of fifty short stories by J. Blaauw about Mr. Vonk, ‘a bigmouth and troublemaker’. There's something strange about J. Blaauw's short stories. They were written in the year 2024, when the author was already 87 years old.

From 1975 to 1978, J. Blaauw was editor of the Amsterdam student weekly Propria Cures, for which he wrote poems that were later published. Since then, he hardly wrote anything. He worked at the brain institute as a biologist for a few years, and spent the rest of his working life as a market trader in antique toys. Only well after his retirement did J. Blaauw resume writing, now short stories such as those included in this book.

Writing never cost him too much effort, but the accompanying drawings all the more so, as he never studied drawing. The drawings are reminiscent of the illustrations of nineteenth-century artists like Heinrich Hoffmann and Wilhelm Busch. Blaauw himself cites George Grosz as an example: ‘He deliberately distorted his scenes. That happens to my art too, albeit more out of imperfection.’

However, readers of this book will definitely enjoy themselves, because both the stories and the drawings are characterized by a vile sense of humor and an unpolished joy.