THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, and What Alice Found There

1872. [one of only about five copies] With Fifty Illustrations by John Tenniel. Sixtieth Thousand. London: Macmillan and Co., 1893. 4 pages undated ads. Original red cloth decorated in gilt, all page edges gilt.

This is one of only a handful of known copies of the suppressed 1893 "Sixtieth Thousand" printing of Lewis Carroll's well-known sequel to his ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice again enters a fantasy world, but this time by stepping through a mirror rather than by falling down a rabbit-hole. LOOKING-GLASS features such characters as Jabberwocky, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, and the Walrus and the Carpenter -- humorously and grotesquely illustrated by John Tenniel. 9,000 copies were initially printed in December 1871, and subsequent printings from the first edition plates brought the total up to 44,000 by 1877. A second edition (not so stated -- but with variations in text) ran through several printings from 1878 to 1886 (up to 56,000). The third edition (again, not so stated) ran from 1887 to 1893, ending with this suppressed 60,000 printing -- after which (see below) the book was out-of-print for four years, until a completely revised fourth edition came out in 1897, beginning with a 61,000 printing -- just before Lewis Carroll's death in January 1898. It is common knowledge that, because Carroll strongly objected to the quality of the first printing of ALICE'S ADVENTURES, Macmillan sent those copies to America where they became the first US edition; it is NOT as common knowledge that Carroll was even more irate about the "60,000" printing of LOOKING-GLASS. The fiasco is well documented -- in Selwyn Goodacre's 1975 monograph "Lewis Carroll's Rejection of the Sixtieth Thousand...". When Carroll received six copies, he was furious at the poor printing of the illustrations, and threatened Macmillan with severing all relations. About sixty of the 1,000 copies had gone out when everything was halted; a leaflet was printed (and inserted into copies of 1893's SYLVIE AND BRUNO CONCLUDED), asking for all copies to be returned, and alerts were published in newspapers. Some copies were subsequently stamped as donations to a Mechanics' Institute. According to the most recent census (again by Goodacre), only FOUR copies of the original sixty, in original cloth and without any donation-stamps, could be located. One (Carroll's own copy, bearing his angry comments) was Lot 32 in Sotheby's July 2018 "Library of an English Bibliophile" sale; also, there is currently on the market a copy priced at 22,500 / $32,000. This copy, which recently surfaced in rural England, is a fifth known copy. It is in good condition only -- rebacked, with the original spine cloth laid down upon later matching red buckram (damage to a few letters of the title), with later black-coated endpapers, and with the half-title and Contents leaves re-hinged. A child has hand-colored nine of the fifty illustrations near the front of the book (though not the frontispiece), and some leaves show soil from her/his fingers. Certainly not a fine copy, but legendarily rare. (We shall include a copy of the 1898-dated "Sixty-Second Thousand" printing -- probably the first after Carroll's death -- for purposes of comparison.).