- Dimensions: 5.4” x 8.1” x 0.65”, hardback, 128 pages
- "On an island, everything is complete.” -Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
- From a renowned artist and writer, a deeply personal nature journal about the island that informed her many works, with paintings by her longtime partner.
- In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä lived, painted, and wrote there, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes.
- Tove's signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti's subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island’s ecology and character. Notes from an Island is both a work of artistic collaboration and an homage to the deep love the two women shared. One feels as if Jansson’s journal, with Tooti’s sketches tucked inside, has been unearthed like a treasure from under a pile of old quilts in the back of their rustic cabin.
- This is a newly-printed book, multiples are available.