Through the Looking Glass (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

CARROLL, Lewis (illus. John Tenniel; metal engravings Frederic Warde; design W. A. Dwiggins). Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2001.

Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt lettering and decoration to covers. Illustrated vignette to lower cover in gilt and red. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 200pp. Illustrations by John Tenniel throughout. "Notes from the Archives" pamphlet laid in. Bookplate adhered to front pastedown. Collector's Library of Famous Editions. Originally published London: Macmillan and Co., 1871.

Lewis Carroll — the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford — published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There six years later, in 1871. Where Wonderland was organized around a pack of playing cards, Looking-Glass is structured as a chess game: Alice begins as a White Pawn and must advance across the board to become a Queen, moving through a landscape organised in alternating squares of red and white. She passes through the mirror above the fireplace of her sitting room and emerges into a reversed world in which everything runs backwards — time, logic, language, and the laws of cause and effect. She encounters the Red Queen, the White Queen, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, and the creatures of the poem "Jabberwocky," which Carroll had published separately in 1855 and which appears here in its fullest context.

Through the Looking-Glass is by most critical reckonings the richer and stranger of the two books: its engagement with logic, language, and the philosophy of identity is more sustained and more deliberate, and its most celebrated passages — Humpty Dumpty's lecture on the meaning of words, the White Knight's song, the Jabberwocky poem itself — have generated more critical commentary than any comparable passages in Wonderland. Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the entire tradition of analytic philosophy have drawn on Carroll's logical games. The book's final image — Alice shaking the Red Queen who transforms into the black kitten — circles back to the opening with a dream logic that has not lost its unsettling quality in a hundred and fifty years.

The illustrations by Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914), the political cartoonist for Punch, are among the most celebrated in the history of children's literature: images so precisely matched to Carroll's imagination that they have effectively displaced it, making it impossible for most readers to visualise Alice except as Tenniel drew her. The Easton Press Collector's Library of Famous Editions presents the complete text with the original Tenniel illustrations reproduced from metal engravings by Frederic Warde, in an edition designed by W. A. Dwiggins — whose work for the Heritage Press and Limited Editions Club tradition brings to the production the authority of mid-twentieth century American fine press design.

Near fine. Some very mild fading to titling gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000595