Peter Rabbit first hopped into the world by post. In 1893, Beatrix Potter sent an illustrated story to Noel Moore, a five-year-old recovering from scarlet fever, drawing on her pet rabbit, Peter Piper.
Years later, Potter borrowed the family’s saved letters and reworked the tale for a small, affordable book. Publishers initially wanted a larger, costlier volume with colour pictures; Potter chose to print her own black-and-white edition in 1901. A publisher eventually agreed, and the commercial book appeared the next year after Potter revised text and pictures.
The tiny format was an artistic decision as much as a practical one: a book designed for children’s hands, with pictures that held attention page by page. Its route from a private letter to a carefully engineered picture book shows how closely Potter guarded the shape of her story.