Bildhuggarens Dotter [The Sculptor's Daughter: a childhood memoir].

1968. Helsingfors; Gebers, Almqvist & Wiksell. 1968. 8vo.; original maize-coloured cloth with lettering in black to spine, in pictorial dustwrapper; pp. [vi], 7-146 + [iii]; a fine, uninscribed copy protected by a near fine dustwrapper, priced 23:50 to lower panel; scarce. First Swedish edition; also published in the same year in Finnish by Schildt. The following year an edition by Albert Bonniers, in Stockholm, was issued, together with the first English translation, which was published by Ernest Benn. This critically acclaimed autobiography by the author and artist Tove Jansson is both a memoir and, as the writer Ali Smith puts it, "a book of superb stories". It describes her experiences growing up in a bourgeois, yet bohemian, environment at Skatudden in Helsinki and her summer life in the archipelago. Written throughout in beautifully evocative prose it offers "a glimpse of the mysteries of winter ice, the bonhomie of balalaika parties and the vastness of Christmas viewed from beneath a tree" (blurb from the English edition). Jansson's childhood experiences, lived in the shadow of the dominant figure of her sculptor father Viktor, had an inestimable impact on her later writing and art, and many the episodes described here are recognisable from her Moomin titles. This is the author's first book aimed at an adult audience. It has become one of the quintessential depictions of a Scandinavian childhood. Only 6 copies of the 1968 printing located on WorldCat (B.L.; B.L. reference; Danish Union Catalogue; Nat. Lib of Finland; Kungliga Biblioteket, Sweden; Malmo Stadsbibliotek); more frequently found in the 1969 printing.