Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. [And:] Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897. Near Fine Copies in Original Cloth of The Final Lifetime Editions
Carroll's Last Revised Text of Alice

CARROLL, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. With forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel. Eighty-sixth thousand. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897.

[with:]

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. With fifty illustrations by John Tenniel. Sixty-first thousand. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1897.

Two volumes. Small octavo (7 1/2 x 5 inches; 191 x 127 mm.). xii, [1]-199, [1, blank] pp. [&] xvi, [1]-231, [1, blank] pp.

Publisher's red cloth over boards, covers triple-ruled in gilt, covers with central gilt medallions depicting "Alice," "The Cheshire Cat," "The Red Queen," and "The White Queen," respectively. Spines lettered in gilt, black coated endpapers, all edges gilt. Some scattered light foxing, Alice with a small one-inch closed tear to the lower margin of the front free endpaper, spines uniformly and very slightly faded, otherwise a spectacular and unusually bright pair of the last lifetime edition.

A fine set of an important issue. Both titles were entirely reset in new type, and the illustrations printed from new electrotypes taken from Tenniel's original woodblocks, which had never themselves been used for printing; as a result, the images appear with a freshness and crispness comparable to those of the earliest editions. Both volumes include prefaces specially written for this Christmas 1897 issue, in which Carroll discusses the text, addresses the famous Mad Hatter's riddle, and offers commentary on pricing and the "Nursery Alice." In Through the Looking-Glass, he further elaborates on the chess problem underlying the narrative and addresses questions of pronunciation in "Jabberwocky."

An unusually bright and well-preserved example of the final lifetime editions. The Eighty-Sixth Thousand of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland represents Carroll's final revised text. All subsequent printings were issued from this setting.