Ben's book collection News about recent publications Tove Jansson bibliography International Tove Jansson editions Sites with related content
First volume of Moomin: The Complete Comic Strip, November 2006! (USA / Canada)
Fantastic news for fans of comics and great writing - and especially for fans of Tove Jansson and the Moomins!

In November 2006, comic publishers Drawn and Quarterly released a hardback collection of the Moomin comic strips which Tove wrote for the London Evening News between 1954 and 1960. These strips form a series of 'adventures', and this first volume includes four of these: Brigands, Family Life, Moomin on the Riviera and Moomin's Desert Island.

There will be four further volumes (one each year, for the next four years), collecting all of Tove's strips for the newspaper.

This is the first book publication of Moomin comic strips in English since 1957! In 1957, Allan Wingate appeared to begin a series of Moomin comic strip books when they published three adventures as Moomin 1 - but no further volumes ever appeared.

The new book can be ordered now, here at Amazon.com!

The publication is also covered online in this Publishers Weekly article and elsewhere.
New French paperback Moomin editions published, December 2005 (France)
French publisher Nathan has brought the Moomin books back to life in France!

They've published new translations of Finn Family Moomintroll (as Moumine le troll: Le chapeau du sorcier) and Moominsummer Madness (as Moumine le troll: L'été dramatique de Moumine).

Let's hope that these are just the beginning, and that further new editions will come out in France!
Complete 'Fuzzy Felt' Moomin TV series released on DVD (UK and Germany)
The 1980s Polish children's TV adaptation of the Moomin stories (often fondly known as by fans as 'The Fuzzy Felt Moomins') has been released for the first time on video or DVD.

It's available in a DVD-Region-2 (European) 7-DVD box-set, sold as The Moomins in the UK, and as Die Mumins in Germany.

My son William, now nearly two years old, is very fond of these DVDs! :-)
Two Tove Jansson films at London festival, April 2004 (UK)
Two films made by and about Tove Jansson were screened in early April 2004 as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. The films were Haru - The Island of the Solitary and Travel with Tove (Resa Med Tove).

I was very keen to see these films, but the timing made it impossible - they were screened on the same day we were expecting our first child to be born! So I didn't go... and William was born three days later :-)

Articles in the press indicated that this film festival also toured the UK during 2004 - but unfortunately, neither film is yet available on DVD in the UK / US.
Who Will Comfort Toffle? published, October 2003 (UK)
Sort Of Books has published a new translation of Who Will Comfort Toffle? - the book became available in late October 2003. The previous English edition of this title (translated, I think, by Kingsley Hart) had been out of print for a long time.

Like the popular 2001 edition of The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My, the new Toffle is translated / adapted by the poet Sophie Hannah.
Moominvalley in November republished, September 2003 (USA)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Moominvalley in November in the US in September 2003, in both hardback and paperback editions. The book had been out of print for several years, so this is great news for American Moomin fans.

Now all we need is for someone to persuade Penguin Books to publish a new edition of Moominpappa at Sea in the UK!
The Summer Book released, May 2003 (UK)
Sort Of Books began the 21st-century Tove Jansson revival by publishing a stunning new edition of The Summer Book, one of her most popular books for adults.

The book got into a lot of top-seller lists and received strong reviews - here are links to reviews from the Guardian and the Observer newspapers.
This site, The Moomin Trove, created in September 2003
Originally I created a web page listing my collection of Tove Jansson books to help myself avoid buying the same book twice! Late in 2003 I decided to redesign my site and add more content - and I expect to add more scans, reviews and synopses soon. My wife Katy came up with the Moomin Trove name :-)

For anyone interested in the technical side of this site, the domain is rented through the UK company XCalibre. The collection pages are generated using a C++ program I wrote, though I may shift it all to Perl at some point.

My book cover scans were made using Mustek and later Canon scanners, and all other graphics were designed with Paintshop Pro. I created the static text and template pages using the wonderful Textpad text editor.