Two young brothers, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, worried that ordinary Germans were forgetting their oldest stories.

So they went door to door with a notebook, drank coffee with grandmothers, and wrote down whatever they were told.

In 1812 they published a small book of eighty-six tales called Kinder- und Hausmarchen — Children's and Household Tales.

Rapunzel, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog Prince — all of them came out of that notebook.

The first edition was much darker than what most children read today: Cinderella's stepsisters cut off their own toes to fit the slipper, and the stepmother in Snow White was made to dance in red-hot iron shoes.

The Grimms kept softening it edition after edition.

But the point stands: nearly every fairy tale you know was almost lost, and two brothers with a pot of coffee saved it.