1998 The Lewis Carroll Centenary Year

The year 1998 was the centenary of the death of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and awareness and appreciation ran at high levels.

My experience of a live auction opened the door a little for me to collect further and, this time at provincial auction houses I acquired three scarce items quite cheaply.  These were the first and third editions of Curiosa Mathematica Part II (Pillow Problems) and a copy of the fifth thousand (1867) of Alice. Following the 4,000 copies of the first published edition in 1866, this book was in original cloth in good/very good condition with a repairable separation at the upper hinge of about an inch and fell to me for £140 hammer price, which was a treat as I’d expected to pay up to £450. Later the same year I bought Notes by An Oxford Chiel from James Cummins of New York. This is a collection of six Dodgson pamphlets bound together without a general contents page, all edges gilt, green cloth with a single gilt border (no corner dots) with orig. yellow endpapers and published in 1874. I had wanted a copy since arriving in Oxford in 1993 but had not found one in the local bookshops.

The last picture here shows my copy of The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford, and the first of Dodgson’s Oxford pamphlets and also published in the volume already mentioned. This is a fine copy and belonged to Harold Hartley, the famous Carroll collector. It came from Bloomsbury auctions 24 June 1999.