Tove Jannson, Illustrator of Classics not her Own

Tove Jannson is probably best know to many of us (certainly to me) as the creator of the charming Moomin stories. But she also illustrated other folks’ books too. Say Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  (you can view all her illustrations for it here). I am picky about my Alice illustrators as so many make the book dark and scary, but Jannson does a splendid job maintaining the whimsical nature of the book as Carroll intended it, a children’s book mind you! (She also did Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark.) And now thanks to bookshelves of doom I’ve come across her illustrations for The Hobbit, a book that, unlike The Lord of the Rings, was originally conceived as a children’s book and still, to my mind (whatever Peter Jackson does with it), is one. Happily, Jannson seems to think that way too.