The Hunting of the Snark - Lewis Carroll and Tove Jansson

The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Tove Jansson / ISBN 9781917055246 / 64-page hardback published by Tate / 2025 edition

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Newly reissued, this beautiful jacketed edition of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, illustrated with perfect whimsy by Tove Jansson, follows an eccentric crew in search of that most mysterious and elusive of creatures: the Snark. The Hunting of the Snark relates in glittering verse the story of how the Bellman and his eccentric crew, who include a butcher, a baker, a beaver and a tailor, set off in quest of that most mysterious and elusive of creatures: the Snark. In 1959, Tove Jansson, the creator of Moomin Valley and its magical inhabitants, was commissioned to illustrate a Swedish edition of Lewis Carroll's miniature masterpiece. It proved an inspired choice, as the enigmatic charms of Jansson's illustrative style bring to life the beauty and strangeness of Carroll's tale. The minds of two of the greatest children's authors of the past 150 years meet on the page. Remarkably, amid the success of Tove Jannson's Moomin books, her unique edition of The Hunting of the Snark was forgotten, and has been unavailable for over fifty years. Now, for the first time, these beautiful illustrations are matched with Lewis Carroll's original English text, so that readers can encounter this wonderful adventure afresh through the eyes of one of Europe's finest illustrators.