In June 2000 Bloomsbury Auctions sold the Denis Crutch
collection of Lewis Carroll. Denis was a founder member of the Lewis Carroll
Society and co-editor of the Lewis Carroll Handbook and had a large and
important collection of original items. I bought a second book from Carroll’s
library, again with a very good provenance. Thomas
Hood’s Petsetilla’s Posy / A Fairy Tale for Young and Old, with elaborate
green cloth gilt, original grey endpapers and 50 engravings by the Dalziel Brothers
had been published in 1870 by Routledge. It appeared for sale in Blackwell’s
catalogue 433 in 1938 with a description of the intertwined CLD monogram in
purple ink and had eventually found its’ way into the Crutch collection and
then into mine. It would have been prized by Carroll for its whimsical tales
and illustrations, engraved by the Dalziels , who of course engraved Tenniel’s
illustrations for the Alice books.
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