Making it real - models and maps by Kathleen Jones
My favourite childhood books are the Moomintroll series written by Finnish author Tove Jansson. She was an artist and she illustrated her own books. For me, as the reader, the illustrations were a big part of the magic because they worked so well with the text. Moomin Valley was a very real place, maybe because I was seeing it just as the author had created it. The Moomin house in Moomin Valley I was quite grown-up before I realised that Tove Jansson and her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietila, had also created maps, tableaux and an actual five-story model of the Moomin House which was in the Moomin museum in Finland. The big surprise was that the house they made was different to the illustrations - it was square rather than round as it appears in the books and this puzzled me. The reason seems to be that it was specially made for a biennale of illustrations in Bratislava and was going to be exhibited in a corner. The only way that Tove could make...