Odds and Ends · October 30, 2026

Four guinea pigs and a book series.

Rocky, Mr. Grey, Toffy and Mojito live with us. In summer they’re outside in their enclosure, in winter they move into the house. A few weeks ago it was time for the move to winter quarters again, and since then I feel like I walk past them about thirty times a day.

That’s dangerous. Because that’s how my books happen.

The four of them are the main characters of Die Wirtschaftsschweinchen, a children’s book series about money and economics. Of course the real ones don’t run any businesses. Rocky doesn’t own a ballpoint pen, and in real life Mr. Grey doesn’t wear gold professor glasses. But if you watch animals long enough, you notice how different they are. And at some point you realize you’re thinking about them the way you think about coworkers.

Rocky is the one who gets to the food first and acts like he organized it himself. In the books he starts companies and declares a crisis every time a price goes up.

Mr. Grey sits next to him looking like he’s seen it all before, probably back in ancient Rome. In the books he explains taxes in a way you won’t forget.

Toffy has a big heart and an even bigger appetite, usually at the same time. In the books he asks the question everyone is thinking: But is that fair?

And Mojito reads the fine print. He sums up what’s going on in a single sentence, and most of the time he only has one eye open while he does it.

When we put the four heads side by side for the website, Mojito suddenly looked bigger than the others. We zoomed his head down several times until he no longer looked like he’d taken over the company. I don’t think he noticed. Or he didn’t let on. With Mojito, you can never quite tell.

If you want to meet the four of them, they have their own website: wirtschaftsschweinchen.de.

Daria Helck