Aventures d'Alice au Pays des Merveilles

  • Londres: Macmillan and Co., 1869
By CARROLL, Lewis.; DODGSON, Charles Lutwidge TENNIEL, John, illustrator
Londres: Macmillan and Co., 1869. Alice" en Français - One of the Great Early Translations of a Literary Classic
The 1869 First French Edition, Exceptionally Preserved in Original Cloth

CARROLL, Lewis [Lewis Carroll]. Aventures d'Alice au Pays des Merveilles. Traduit de l'Anglais par Henri Bué. Illustré de 42 vignettes par John Tenniel. Londres: Macmillan & Co., 1869.

First Edition in French. Octavo (7 3/16 x 4 3/4 inches; 183 x 123 mm.). [10], 196 pp. Engraved frontispiece and forty-one text illustrations.

Publisher's blue cloth over boards, covers with triple gilt fillets, upper cover with central oval vignette of Alice, lower cover with the Cheshire Cat, spine ruled and lettered in gilt, dark gray coated endpapers, all edges gilt. Housed in a dark blue cloth clamshell case, spine with black morocco label lettered in gilt.

A near fine copy - exceptionally bright and well-preserved, the hinges untouched - quite possibly among the finest examples encountered.

This 1869 French Alice - translated by Henri Bué, is the second foreign-language edition of the work (following the German edition earlier the same year), and one of the most admired early translations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The translator Henri Bué's achievement is remarkable: Carroll's linguistic play - puns, inversions, nonsense logic, and neologism - is notoriously resistant to translation, yet here rendered with grace, wit, and structural fidelity across two fundamentally different languages.

The illustrations by John Tenniel are inseparable from the identity of Alice. Tenniel (1820-1914), long associated with Punch magazine, brought to Carroll's text a precision of line and a disciplined imagination that fixed the visual form of Wonderland for generations. His Alice, poised, observant, and distinctly Victorian - anchors the surrounding absurdity, while his unforgettable creations (the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts) translate Carroll's linguistic invention into enduring iconography. Few partnerships between author and illustrator have proven so definitive.

A cornerstone for collectors of Lewis Carroll.

Avery, 44; Williams, 16; Williams, Madan, Green & Crutch, 73.

Details

Title

Aventures d'Alice au Pays des Merveilles

Author

CARROLL, Lewis.; DODGSON, Charles Lutwidge TENNIEL, John, illustrator

Condition

Unknown

Publisher

Londres: Macmillan and Co., 1869


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