      disaster and the founding of the community in Moomin Valley from which the nine novels and the three picture books take their being. These were conceived as stories in which words and illustrations would be interdependent – Jansson’s visualizations are essential – and the rooms devoted to select drawings and preliminary drafts are revelatory of her superb graphic skills (pen and ink may be the main medium but you can see also her use of scraper-board, pencil, and even ball-point  techniques to brilliant interpretations of Swedish editions of Tolkien’s Hobbit and Dodgson’s Snark, while his Alice unusually introduces gouache tints.


And now for something different...


Tove Jansson: a European Touring Exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, 25 October 2017 - 28 January 2018


The universal association of Tove Jansson with the stories about the Moomins needs little explanation, but this display over six rooms at Dulwich provides an illuminating context for the intense creative life within which those works were created. Jansson was born into an artistic family in Helsinki in 1914, her father a sculptor and her mother a painter and graphic designer, so it is of little wonder that she too sought to become a painter, studying at schools in Stockholm, Paris, and Helsinki           language was Swedish).


                        pictures and, later, abstract studies from nature – but seemingly without a governing direction. The political woes of the Baltic states in the 30s and 40s were not conducive to a stable career and perhaps her most impressive work from this period is seen in the ferocious graphic covers that she did for the Swedish magazine Garm, satirizing both war and the totalitarian forces essentially responsible for it.


 centrality of her belief in Home as a base for civilised living and a surety against which calamities and adventures may be confronted are a main source for her invention of Moominland and its inhabitants which began to formulate themselves during the 1940s. The arrival of Småtrollen och den Översvämningen (The Moomins and the Great Flood) in Sweden


BfK


Kevin, The Make-Believe Friend You Can Really Believe In





Rob Biddulph, Harper-Collins, 40pp, 978 0 00 820741 0, £12.99, hbk


Sid blames his domestic misdemeanours on an invisible friend. If his dinner’s thrown on the  then he’s not to blame. It’s Kevin.        invisible Kevin by his exasperated and understandably sceptical parents, he draws a furry pink spotted blob, who is ‘kind but clumsy’. Little does he expect to meet Kevin that very night and go to live in Kevin’s family      there, however, he creates exactly the same kind of chaos which he has attributed to Kevin in his own life. But


there his actions give him pause for thought. Rob Biddulph has created a clever rhyming cautionary tale about personal responsibility and friendship that is funny and thoughtful and brought to life in stylish illustrations. Perhaps cleverest of all, because never put into words, is the contrast between the sepia of Sid’s ordinary life, with its implied loneliness and boredom, and the weird psychedelic forms and colours of his imagination. It’s a book that’s not only cautionary but also reassuring and comforting. CB


Hack and Whack 


Francesca Simon, illus Charlotte Cotterill, Faber & Faber, 32pp, 978-0-571-32872-7, £6.99, pbk


       lively Vikings brothers, are not keen


            publicity ephemera, but its main addition to the oeuvre is in some rare examples of the one-time famous strip cartoons that were in 1947 commissioned for the Finnish paper Ny Tid (New Times) but later became world famous through their appearance daily in the London Evening News. An essay by Paul Gravett in the main exhibition catalogue gives little-known details about this venture, which was focused on an adult readership, and is here backed up with examples of Jansson’s preparatory drafts and sketches and printed versions of the strips, most of whose originals have disappeared. Unlike the plain walls against which most of the exhibits are shown, those of this large room are themselves done up as a giant greyscale Moominland forest landscape which is strikingly reminiscent of Max’s dreamscape in Where the Wild Things Are.


In conclusion, I am bound to remark how, in contrast to provisions by the House of Illustration, Dulwich not only explains its exhibits with neat and unobtrusive labels but offers a ‘hand-held guide’ to them which includes translations of the narrative pictures that help one to understand what the illustration is actually illustrating.


A Drink of Water and other stories Second edition. Thames & Hudson, 2017, 978-0-5006-5135-3. £10.95hbk


All the Year Round 2017, 978-1-7834-4613-1 £12.99hbk


Brian Alderson is founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times. His book The Ladybird Story: Children’s Books for Everyone, The British Library, 978-0712357289, £25.00 hbk, is out now.


reviews Under 5s Pre – School/Nursery/Infant


 to carry on roaring, raging and rampaging. Causing havoc wherever they go, they collect other children along the way to join in their noisy rumpus. However their fearsome mum is determined to get them ready for bed and she catches up with them in the end. Unceremoniously they are bathed and inserted into miniature long ship beds – because ‘even Vikings need to sleep!’ The story is rhyming and repetitive


and invites young readers to join in:  There is lots of spot in the detailed      children will love the scene when our young mischief makers tip over a  The detailed end papers give a great sense of life in a Viking village,


the arrows at the back of the book        chaotic bedtime escapade. Two new irrepressible and irresistible anarchic characters from Francesca Simon creator of the highly popular Horrid Henry series. SMc


The Snow Lion 


Jim Helmore, ill. Richard Jones, Simon & Schuster, 32pp, 978 1 4711 6224 4, £6.99 pbk


Caro and her mum move to ‘a house at the top of a hill’ and when Caro discovers that everything in the house is white - white walls and ceilings and doors – she feels lonely and wishes for friends. Magically, a cuddly white lion materialises from the wall and suggests a game of hide and seek. The almost mystical illustrations of


Books for Keeps No.227 November 2017 21


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