Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber.
I'm sitting here with Ann Miller, James Harkin, and Anna Chazinski,
and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order,
here we go.
Starting with you, James Harkin.
Okay, my fact this week is that the very hungry caterpillar was originally called A Week with Willie the Worm.
Nice.
Quite a different book that sounds like.
Yeah, how similar was it to the story about a caterpillar?
Well, it was a different ending, but it was a similar...
The worm didn't turn into a butterfly.
No, the worm didn't turn into a butterfly.
The book was written by a guy called Eric Karl, and he was inspired by a hole punch.
He noticed that the hole was going through some paper, and he thought, what if I turn this into a book?
And so he thought, well, I could do a book worm that goes through the holes.
And so that's why it was called Willie the Book Worm, and then I think it was his publisher came up to him and said,
well, why don't you change it instead of a worm into a caterpillar?
And he thought, aha, caterpillars turn into butterflies, spoiler alert.