Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. With Forty-Two Illustrations by John Tenniel. Fifth Thousand. London: Macmillan and Co, 1867.
THE FIRST EDITION OF PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT CHILDREN'S BOOK EVER PUBLISHED IN THE ORIGINAL PUBLISHER'S CLOTH BINDING.
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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 five 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.
The first published edition arrived in 1866 with 3,000 copies (or 2,000, sources differ), and the second printing of this first edition was printed in a print run of just 1,000 copies, bearing the writing "fifth thousand" on the title page as we find with this example. The very small print run of this makes it one of the rarest printings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and also one of the earliest it is possible to obtain, with the 1866 first edition often selling for over $40,000 at auction in nice original condition. We sold a fairly similar 'sixth thousand' example for £5,200 (GBP) in 2023. It's worth mentioning that some sources regard these printings as separate editions thus making this the third overall, or second published (obtainable) edition.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was originally published in 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 in lovely condition which is particularly remarkable given that these were mostly owned and read by children, where one often finds illustrations naively coloured in, leaves torn or missing, etc.
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Size: 129 x 186 mm (approx.)
Condition:
[6ff, pp.[1]-192]
Original red cloth binding. Some discolouration as typical but this could be improved through the application of a book cloth cleaner. Some rubbing along the joints and at extremities. Both boards are securely attached and the book is structurally secure. The gilt is bright and without loss. Minor loss to the cloth at joints. Binding slightly cocked with shelf lean. Internally very good and collated as complete. Some light foxing to the tissue guard of the frontispiece and a small amount to the endpapers, else remarkably clean throughout with just the occasional spot or small stain. Later endpapers with the original pastedowns present and visible underneath. There is an early ink ownership inscription to the head of the half title page and a glued down newspaper article to the verso blank discussing the sale of a "rare first issue" that sold for £1,200 at Sotheby's, presumably a very long time ago given the most recent sale of $2.9 million! Overall an excellent example of this very rare first edition.
[Green 42].
