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Gems from the Moominvalley archives
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Scouting for Trolls

by Antonuzzo

001 Tampere

Finland beckons, promising the rare chance to experience Moominland Midwinter for real. My faint hopes of glimpsing the Northern Lights are pretty much dashed – despite Naantali having a decent lack of light pollution, the weather looks to be overcast. However, there has been plenty of snow, so I should get some decent atmospheric shots of my Troll bothering.

I’m bringing a small arsenal of cameras on this trip. The trusty Lumix LX5 is the mainstay – this is essentially a Leica with Panasonic branding and so half the price (even cheaper on eBay). For a compact, it is an awesome camera – a very bright 24mm that stops down to 2.0, and ‘pro’ features such as shooting in RAW format, a flash hotshoe, and some good shutter and aperture priority modes. A nice touch is the ability to change aspect ration on the fly via a slider on the lens barrel.

The aforementioned Fuji W3 is coming along for 3D shots; it works best in bright surroundings, so the snow should help reduce the noise on the pictures.

Last up is a vintage (read: 1980s) Nimslo. This was a brave attempt to bring consumer-grade 3D back that never caught on. It’s a solidly-engineered camera that shoots four half-frame shots over two frames of 35mm. There was a lenticular printing service as well, but this shut down decades ago; once the film has been developed it’ll mean spending some time in Photoshop reassembling them.

I’m also going to be spending a bit of time in various libraries and, thanks to the incredible diligence of the library staff, have a number of books and microfilms awaiting my perusal. Watch this space for some seriously rare Tove Jansson material in the very near future…

Moomin recording machines

Moomin recording machines

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Moomin and the Discworld

by Antonuzzo

“…when I discovered the library, and wanted to read every damned thing. I went absolutely through it. I went not knowing they were sexy novels, but read sexy novels and Tove Jansson and Just William. I read anything that I saw…”

When Terry Pratchett died in 2015, the door closed on a whole universe. Aside from the publication of his final book, The Shepherd’s Crown, his daughter was adamant that there would be no more books forthcoming. No compendiums of uncompleted works and most certainly nobody carrying on the torch.  We’re a bit luckier with Tove Jansson. Although Moominvalley in November was ostensibly the final book, the comic strips continued for another five years courtesy of Lars, and archive material does leak out from time to time (hence this blog).

Pratchett was a voracious reader and skilled at inserting wry homages into his work. His love of Sci-Fi legend Larry Niven is evident from his second novel, Strata, which is essentially a parody of Niven’s classic, Ringworld. Even in Going Postal, there is an analogy of a golem’s belief that time is circular and his patience in waiting for it to come around and repeat itself; much like Seeker’s quest for the Base of the Arch in the same Niven book. The Moomin references are more subtle but they’re there, they’re there…

Perhaps the most evident one is in Thud! Where a demonic entity called The Summoning Dark heralds its arrival with a recurring symbol, an eye with a tail. First appearing as a sign scratched in the blood of a dying dwarf, the symbol pops up repeatedly throughout the book; here as a fallen hosepipe and an onion, there as an assortment of toys in a nursery, again as fallen pieces on a gaming board. Undoubtedly, there’s a parallel with the appearance of the star-with-a-tail symbol in Comet in Moominland.

In Making Money, Moist von Lipwig’s brush with death whilst scaling the wall of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office echoes Fillyjonk’s narrow escape from peril in Moominvalley in November; and Wee Mad Arthur’s barking instructions to Sergeant Colon whilst sitting on his head in Feet of Clay (‘Someone landed on his helmet and kicked it like a man spurs on a horse. “Right turn! Forward!”’) is a riff on Little My marching Moomin across the ice floes in Moominland Midwinter.

I daresay that I’ve missed a few. That’s a good excuse to re-read the entire Pratchett canon, isn’t it?

 

 

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The 3D Moomins

by Antonuzzo

With my next trip to Muumimaailma looming, I thought it would be good time to share some unusual pictures from my last trip. I took a Fuji W3 3D digital camera along to capture some trolls in all their 3D glory. I’m bringing it along next week, along with a vintage Nimslo 35mm 3D camera. Hopefully I’ll get better shots from the latter – the Fuji is an extremely cool bit of kit but pictures shot in anything other than bright sunlight leave a fair bit to be desired.  However, it does have the ability to shoot 3D movies, one of which is posted below. I’ve also included a couple of shots from Muumilaakso, the Moomin Museum at Tampere.

The images have been converted to red / green anaglyph, so you’ll either need a pair of 3D glasses (not the sort you get in the cinema – they’re polarised) or treat yourself to a box of Quality Street and use the cellophane.

Snorkmaiden and Moomin

Snorkmaiden

 

Most of the Family

003 Perhe

Snorkmaiden and Fillyjonk

004 Fillyjonk

Snufkin playing poker with Moominmamma

005 Snufkin

The Groke

006 Groke

Too-Ticky and her boat

007 Too-Ticky

And finally… the video

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Moomin and the Detectives

by Antonuzzo

margerysmall

One of the first rare Moomin items that I picked up was the first compendium of strips published by Wingate in 1957, three years after the strip premiered in The Evening News.

I’ll cover this book in all its glory in a later post, but one item of particular interest is the foreword.

Margery Allingham was one of the leading lights of the Golden Age of detective fiction, an aptly named era whose other leading lights included Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen and many others. Detective themes pop up often in the Moomin strips; Moominpappa is seldom happier than when he’s up a tree nursing a glass of whisky, with his snout down in an Agatha Christie novel.

Tove Jansson was a huge admirer of Margery Allingham and her Albert Campion stories and, unbeknownst to her, the publisher sought out Allingham to write the foreword to the book. Allingham was all too happy – she herself was a fan of the strips.

Like all good mysteries, this raises many questions. Did the mutual admirers ever get to meet? Was Agatha Christie also approached? We may never know.

But I can take some delight in reprinting the foreword, verbatim, for the first time in nearly sixty years. I’ll leave it to übersleuths to pick out the two errors made by the author…

Foreword

Perhaps it is true to say that everybody who has ever held a battered first edition of a classic in his hand has wondered secretly if he would be experiencing the same thrill if the copy was mint new, untried, damp from the press, the ink scarcely dry. I have always thought that for my own part the answer was ‘of course not’. Now I am not so sure.

The saga of the Moomin Family, which has been awaited impatiently by so many of us who have been following the strip in the Evening News, possesses, for me at any rate, the thrill already. I can only explain it by saying that it seems to be an elementary question of quality.

Surely this series is that very rare thing, an instantly recognisable work of art? To be certain of this, I submit, one has only to consider a single drawing. Art experts are forever lecturing us about the purity and economy of line and sometimes the layman is privately put about to discover precisely what the jargon means. But here there is the perfect line and perfect economy and nothing else whatever to get in the way. Even the work of the original master of this genre, Caran D’Ache, was a little more wasteful, a fraction more mannered than these exquisite pictures which say every subtle thing they want to say as purely and simply as a bell rings a note.

On the Moomins themselves I find myself uncharacteristically reticent. Their appeal is so personal and so intricate that I feel chatter about them is like gossip in public about friends.

For me, Snorkmaiden, superbly feminine, divinely innocent, curvacious as Marilyn Monroe, if not quite in the same places, is one of the most endearing heroines I have ever known. Whilst Moomin himself, always screwing up his courage in the deathless cause of knight errantry, has all the touching honesty of a figure from an early Wells novel.

Mama Moomin, too, never without her handbag and discreet apron, must clearly be one of the outstanding fictional figures of our age. Her virtues and her failings are contemporary. If she is making the best of an ignoble impulse to keep up with the Fillijonks or dealing with the psychotic vagaries of a maidservant only likely at the present time, she exudes an affable but obstinate form of courage which one meets almost everywhere in the world today, save in print.

Yet, somehow these are not matters to discuss. It is a very odd thing but when Moomin fans discover each other they do not begin at once a duet of eulogy starting ‘Do you remember when…?’ or ‘Who does Stinky remind you of?’ but are much more likely to sit down trustingly together, speaking of lesser matters, each quietly confident that the other is not only a man of undoubted taste and intelligence, good looking and urbane but also, which is much more extraordinary, absolutely sound at heart.

Margery Allingham

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