Introduction

Next year  marks the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 

Between now and then this illustrated blog will unfold one collectors’ story with photographs of all the key items from a collection that was started from scratch. On a rainy afternoon in Bristol 25 years ago I spotted a piece in a medical weekly magazine about a doctor who was a Lewis Carroll collector. The photograph showed a man and a pile of his antiquarian Alice books and before I could say “ Brillig” a dormant part of me was roused from a long hibernation. As a boy I had collected football cards, stamps, and various small animals and then must have had a long pause to collect knowledge instead out of necessity. I wrote to the gentleman and received a very warm and encouraging response and knew that I too would like to become a Lewis Carroll collector.

On my doorstep were a large number of secondhand bookshops and I first tried my luck in Robert’s bookshop on The Triangle in Clifton. I had no idea what I was doing. The barn-like musty-smelling dim interior contained several people acting in a fairly odd manner, moving very slowly along rows of books and every now and then pulling one off a shelf with a hand extended like a crow’s claw. The proprietor was stirred from his reverie at times  for the melancholy ritual of the exchange of book and paper bag for a few pence in time with the tapping of the rain on the roof. In this fashion I bought my first item, a copy of a miniature edition of The Hunting of the Snark, and a similar early reprint of the miniature edition of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The price was written in pencil inside and I learned shortly afterwards that it was OK to enquire about the price even though it could be read ever so clearly and I remember getting my queerest looks of all from booksellers who I didn’t haggle with.

Travelling with my fiancée to see my parents in Bridgnorth that summer I explored the teetering stacks of secondhand books in the now extinct shop at the top of the steps in High Town. Rubbing his chin, the owner of the shop recalled he had an Alice book waiting to be repaired at home and that he could produce this after lunch. This book was a milestone as it required more cash than I had been used to giving for any second hand book but more importantly it was in fact a bargain for an early edition of the masterpiece that was Alice. Then the fellow slit the book from top to toe with a repairer’s knife revealing the inner layers of newspaper that binders used to use, making me wince. He repaired it expertly and handed it over for £30. I thought it was utterly beautiful and still do. This “sixteenth thousand” printing from 1869 was the first of many of this style of Alice binding that I acquired, matched by similar printings of Looking Glass.

1869 ( Sixteenth thousand) Alice, Macmillan London.