“CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER!”: FIRST EDITIONS OF ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND AND THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, IN LOVELY UNRESTORED ORIGINAL CLOTH

CARROLL, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. WITH: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan and Company, 1866, 1872. Two volumes. Octavo, original red cloth with gilt pictorial emblems, all edges gilt. Housed in custom cloth chemises and half morocco slipcase. $47,000.

First editions of “the greatest of all English stories for children” (Muir, 139), a very desirable pairing in completely unrestored original cloth in excellent condition.

"Historians of children's literature universally agree that the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland marks the liberation of children's books from the restraining hand of the moralists… The two Alice books… completed the reinstatement of the imagination, so long disapproved of by the opponents of fairy stories, to its proper place. Alice is, in a word, a book of that extremely rare kind which will belong to all the generations to come until the language becomes obsolete" (Carpenter & Prichard, 102). First published and authorized English edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, preceded only by the extraordinarily rare suppressed 1865 London edition, of which only about 20 copies are known to exist, and the scarce New York edition of 1866. First edition, first issue of Through the Looking-Glass, with "wade" on page 21. Lewis Carroll Handbook 46 and 84. Williams 46. Christmas 1865 gift inscription in Alice's Adventures, with another early owner signature; early owner signature, bookseller ticket in Looking-Glass.

Interiors clean, original cloth completely unrestored and near-fine, gilt bright. An excellent and most desirable set.