This might very well be the first book I fell in love with. My parents had a copy of this book on their shelves – like pretty much everyone in the Netherlands at that time. I couldn’t read it yet, or not well enough to make sense of it all, but I understood that it was about the real life of gnomes. The book purports to explain the life and habitat of gnomes, much as a biology book would do, complete with illustrations and textbook notes.
Now, after twenty years of observation, we feel that the time has come to put our experiences and findings on paper, having received permission of course, from an authorised council of gnomes.
It’s very convincing, and as a kid I certainly believed it!
It’s wonderful to see the book again after so many years. I hadn’t realised that the book was massively successful in America as well, selling more than 700,000 copies in the first year alone, leading to several spin-off books and other commercial products.
Our copy of Gnomes is a first UK edition, published in 1978, a year after the original Dutch edition came out.