Robert Walser's seventh book has the most convoluted history of any of his publications. One of the texts first appeared in 1899 as a newspaper article, and three publishing houses (Insel, Georg Müller, and Ernst Rowohlt) planned to publish the collection of disparate newspaper and magazine texts from 1903–1914. Ultimately, the Stories were published by Kurt Wolff, the publisher of Walser's previous collection, Works. The Stories were published at an extremely inopportune time, literally on the eve of World War I, in July 1914.