The House of Tekelden

Read the most by: boys and girls

A delightful, richly illustrated history of an aristocratic family—of dachshunds. With a lineage stretching back as far as the first century AD, few families can lay claim to a history as illustrious and colorful as that of Flower, the tail end of the Tekelden line, for whom Dawnay wrote and illustrated this one-of-a-kind book, “in an almost certainly vain hope that the history of his ancestors will teach Flower to improve.” Starting with Rattila the Hund and his Sack of Rome in 463, Dawnay follows the lives of Rattila’s dachshund descendants, both distinguished and notorious, celebrating their achievements through family portraits by notable artists of the day, from Van Dyck to Picasso. Meet Jan Tekelden, a famous gourmet whose love of garlic and leeks was eulogized by Chaucer, and Odo the Odious, Cardinal Lord Bishop of Bavaria, whose favorite game was to invite rivals to dinner and feed them poisoned pork pies. Celebrated women of the family include Katherine Paw, the acclaimed beauty; la Ratte Ravissante, wife of the rakish Flush Tekelden; and Madame Rattier, who, despite her renowned Parisian salons, was unceremoniously tossed out on her haunches for refusing to ever get off the couch. This full-color facsimile of the original hand-drawn and scripted manuscript has never been available beyond Flower’s family and is a wholly unique, tongue-in-jowl addition to the literature on dogs.