Have you ever seen Tove Jansson Pinocchio book cover?
The Adventures of Pinocchio is a famous novel for children by the Italian author Carlo Collodi. We recently found out that Tove Jansson illustrated the cover photo for the Swedish language version Pinocchios Äventyr in 1932.
The cover image is signed by Tove, but the book’s illustrations are from the original Italian version. The drawing style of the cover is reminiscent of the Moomin illustrations Tove Jansson became famous with later on. At the beginning of the 1930s, Tove Jansson was under 18 years old and studied at the Stockholm College of Applied Arts in Sweden, where she took subjects including ceramic art, painting, and drawing.
The book Pinocchios Äventyr was published by the Söderströms / Stockholm Albert Bonnier in 1932, and the first Moomin book, Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in Swedish in 1945. During her career, Tove Jansson also illustrated other covers and books written by other prestigious authors. The two most important of these were illustrated in the 1960s, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. You can see the photos and read more about them here.
What do you think – would you recognise the drawing without a signature?
Photo: Lena Bruun