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“Two hundred thousand. That’s a serious number.”

Tom Devlin, creative director at Montreal comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, is talking at his desk in the company’s bustling open-plan office on the eighth floor of a well-appointed converted warehouse in the industrial zone by the tracks just north of Mile End.

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The serious figure he’s quoting refers to the number of Tove Jansson books the company has sold. Devlin’s tone indicates that he can’t quite believe it himself, but the ledgers don’t lie. Our setting may be a far cry from the company’s old cramped quarters above a travel agency on Parc Ave., but even so, they’ll soon be relocating to more a spacious office nearby — a move necessitated, in no small part, by the success of a series of books about a family called the Moomins by a writer-illustrator who died in 2001.

Stranger things may have happened in the book business, but there can’t have been many.