Down The Rabbit Hole

I love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I think most of my attachment is connected to the Disney movie, but finally in high school I got around to actually reading the books and discovered new levels of complexity and absurdity in these stories. In the twenty years since then, I've compiled a nice little collection of versions of these books, so let's take a look...

This is the actual Signet Classic pocket sized edition I read twenty years ago in tenth grade. It cost me $3. I carried this around for a month while I slowly read it. It's pretty beat up, but I think that's why I like it.

Alice's Adventures Under Ground is a reproduction of the original, handwritten 1864 manuscript of the story given to Alice Liddell, complete with illustrations by Lewis Carroll. It is over 10,000 words shorter than the first edition published a year later.

The Nursery Alice is a shortened version of the classic tale written by Lewis Carroll and published in 1890. It is aimed at "children from age nought to five". It has 20 of Tenniel's original illustration, enlarged and in color. The text is very condescendingly written directly at the child reader, with lines like "So what do you think they did?" and "Can you guess what happened next?"
You can view the entire Nursery Alice online here.

This is a beautiful two volume hardbound edition with a slipcover, published by Morrow in 1993. I think I got these while in college and when I was reading them for the third time around. A few years ago I purchased another of this edition and hand colored the illustrations as a gift for my 4-year-old half sister.

Here we have a really nice edition from the Everyman's Library Children's Classics from Knopf. Cloth bound with a ribbon bookmark sewn in. This copy was printed in 1992. I don't know when or where I picked it up.

These three are random editions without the classic John Tenniel illustrations. The top one is from 1926 England, the middle from 1955 with illustrations by Roberta Paflin, and the bottom is from 1945 with drawings by Linda Card.
While nothing will ever top the original illustrations, I've come to really enjoy seeing other artist's interpretations of the characters and events.

This copy is a 4-page Alice In Wonderland version from My Favorite Pop-Up Books. There is no credits for the story adaptation or illustrations. It is the only horizontally oriented Alice I have ever seen.

And then there is the utterly amazing Robert Sabuda Pop-Up Book from 2003. With a story very faithful to the original Lewis Carroll text, and illustration done with Tenniel's style in mind, this book is a mindblowing work of art. Get a copy for $20, it's worth it.

And finally we come to The Annotated Alice. This giant book has both Alice's Adventures and Through the Looking-Glass, but with every margin filled with references, notes, additional illustrations, anecdotes, and history of everything you could imagine. This is Alice under the microscope, and it gave me great joy to read this as a young adult, then again as an older adult.
Without it, I wouldn't understand the subtleties of the chess game enacted through the second book. I wouldn't have known the roots of all the nonsense verse throughout. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician, early photographer, poet, and political satirist, and this book does it's best to unearth every trick in the original stories... and beyond.
There is a lot of information in this book (there is more text about the book and in the original story itself). The Annotated Alice is not for someone just wanting to read the story of Alice chasing the White Rabbit. It is scholarly and heavy.

So there you have it. And, I imagine, there are hundreds more editions out there. Please feel free to comment on how these classic stories have been connected to your life, and any other volumes of Alice that I should check out.

Also, I need to go to the SF Public Library to take at peek at this.