Limavez

by madalina andronic

instagram: @prakashdraws

Today marks 150 years since Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland first appeared in print. 2,000 copies of the book were printed in November 1865 and Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, had already given away 50 of these as author’s presentation copies when illustrator John Tenniel decided that his illustrations had been inadequately reproduced. Carroll agreed to finance a new printing and the book was formally released in December 1865 with a postdate of 1866. To recoup some of his money, Carroll sold the withdrawn copies to American publisher Appleton who stripped away the original title pages and replaced them with cancels, a bibliographic term for replacement leaves. Pictured here is the first American edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. All of the pages except the title page were reused from the original English edition. Therefore, the illustrations here are the very ones that Tenniel so strongly objected to. The book is in the original publisher’s red cloth binding, with a gilt illustration of Alice holding a pig on the front board and the Cheshire cat’s grinning head on the rear board. The RBML’s copy has a gift inscription on the half-title which reads: Presented to Daniel Guilfoyle on his recovery from mesles by his friend Thomas Potter Binghampton NY Nov 22 1873 This edition comes from our Flodden Heron Lewis Carroll Collection, which includes original photographs of Alice Liddell, autographed letters from Dodgson, and an oil portrait of Dodgson. Heron was a bibliographer and Carroll collector who, incidentally, wrote an essay about this very edition of Alice in Wonderland for The Colophon titled “The 1866 Appleton Alice” (1936). SL Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (New York : D. Appleton and Company, 1866) 823 D66a1866: http://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-uiu/Record/uiu_7024918/Description Flodden Heron collection of Lewis Carroll papers, 1876-1895: http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/archon/?p=collections/controlcard&id=1438