The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a children’s picture book designed, illustrated, and written by Eric Carle, first published by the World Publishing Company in 1969, later published by Penguin Putnam. The book features a very hungry caterpillar who eats his way through a wide variety of foodstuffs before pupating and emerging as a butterfly. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is Carle’s third book, and uses distinctive collage illustrations that were innovative at the time of publication, ‘eaten’ holes in the pages, and simple text with educational themes – counting, the days of the week, foods, and a butterfly’s life stages. It teaches children how to count and to make one-to-one correspondences between numbers and the items the Very Hungry Caterpillar has eaten.
Carle said he was inspired by a hole punch: “One day I was punching holes with a hole puncher into a stack of paper, and I thought of a bookworm and so I created a story called A Week with Willi the Worm.” Carle was familiar with “differently shaped pages” from books that he read as a child in Germany.
A Week with Willi the Worm featured a bookworm named Willi. Ann Beneduce, Carle’s editor, advised that a green worm would not make a likable protagonist. “Then my editor suggested a caterpillar instead and I said ‘Butterfly!’ That’s how it began,” Carle recalls.
The differently shaped pages with holes representing the caterpillar’s trail through foodstuffs were a challenge. Because printers in the U.S were too expensive, Beneduce located and used a print shop in Japan.
Picture Credit : Google
