Jabberwocky - Vansittart Pamphlet

Twas Brillig indeed to be the successful bidder for this copy of Vansittart's fine translation of Lewis Carroll's famous poem, tipped onto the front endpaper of a 10th thousand of Looking Glass. The book also had the ownership signature of William Warner, a contemporary of Dodgson at Christ Church, in the college purple ink.

An Early Lewis Carroll Puzzle

In The Monthly Packet of 1881 appeared, in Charlotte Yong’s periodical, a new puzzle devised by Mr Lewis Carroll, called Mischmasch. On the last page of Vol.1 (third series) appeared the seven rules. I bought a bound volume in 2005 for £10 on Ebay. This would I suspect keep a lot of people perfectly happy. However in 2006, the late Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley California had an original for sale, a snip really at $1500, which needed a little TLC along part of the hinge and was restored for me by an archivist in York. It was printed in 1882 by the Oxford University Press, and not reprinted in this form. The word game apparently kept lots of Victorian folk very happy in the days before the internet and i-pads and Big Brother.