Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. With Forty-Two Illustrations by John Tenniel. London: Macmillan and Co, 1866.
THE VERY RARE TRUE FIRST PUBLISHED EDITION OF ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND; ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND INFLUENTIAL CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF ALL TIME.
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a notoriously difficult book to find in early edition form with very few copies printed. This is one of the first two (or three) thousand copies of this book ever printed. Using the data from Lewis Carroll's bibliography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Macmillan's Bibliographical Catalogue from 1891, we find that the original 1865 edition was printed with 2,000 copies, for which almost no copies survive in private hands, the last selling for $2.9 million at Sotheby's and is generally considered unobtainable. That edition was never actually published and the fact that a couple of copies exist is more by chance than original intent and thus the 1866 first published edition is generally regarded as the first edition.
This first published edition arrived in 1866 with 3,000 copies (or 2,000, sources differ). This makes this very rare 1866 true first published edition not only very scarce, as it was originally intended as a children's book and thus most copies were essentially destroyed, with coloured in illustrations, pages torn out, etc. This 1866 first edition often sells for over $40,000 at auction in nice original condition. We sold a 'sixth thousand' example in its original binding etc for £5,200 (GBP) in 2023, i.e. the third printing of the first edition, or fourth overall edition as some regard it. This copy offered for sale is the second overall edition and first published.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was originally published in a notoriously fragile red cloth and examples in original condition are very scarce and if encountered, are usually in poor condition. Our example offered here is not in its original binding and has been rebound, but does retain the original gilt designs to both boards showing both Alice and the Cheshire cat.
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Size: 137 x 195 mm (approx.)]
Condition:
[half title, frontis, main title, (4), pp.[1]-192]
Lacks the first original blank, retaining the last and lacks the contents leaf else collates as complete. Modern red cloth retaining the original gilt roundel designs over the original red cloth. The binding is amateur and would benefit from rebinding; the spine is too large for the page block thus causing the boards to warp. Replaced endpapers. All page edges gilt. Half title with an early gift ink inscription dated February 24th 1870. Mostly light foxing throughout the whole text block. Amateur and seemingly superfluous page edge repairs to pp.16, 32, 36, and 96, affecting one side of each leaf only. These do not cause any loss to the text and appear to be removable. Some light stains to pp.40-41 not making any text illegible. Some small leaf edge tears not affecting any text and only extending as far as within the blank marginal spaces.
[Green 46].
