Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Illustrated by Mervyn Peake

Famed worldwide for his Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake was also an illustrator of rare and wondrous talent, whose editions of Treasure Island and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are universally admired. In the 1940s he was commissioned to produce a set of 70 pen-and-ink drawings to accompany Lewis Carroll's two classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. They are among his best work as an illustrator. Unavailable in any edition since 1978, these extraordinary illustrations, many of which were drawn on poor quality wartime paper, have been restored to their former clarity and crispness by a combination of old-fashioned craft and the latest computer technology. They are now meticulously reproduced, for the first time, as they were meant to be seen. This exquisite two-volume set is the first edition to do justice to two great English eccentrics.

Source of legend and lyric, reference and conjecture, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is for most children pure pleasure in prose. While adults try to decipher Lewis Carroll's putative use of complex mathematical codes in the text, or debate his alleged use of opium, young readers simply dive with Alice through the rabbit hole, pursuing "The dream-child moving through a land / Of wonders wild and new." There they encounter the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Mock Turtle, and the Mad Hatter, among a multitude of other characters--extinct, fantastical, and commonplace creatures. Alice journeys through this Wonderland, trying to fathom the meaning of her strange experiences. But they turn out to be "curiouser and curiouser," seemingly without moral or sense.

For more than 130 years, children have reveled in the delightfully non-moralistic, non-educational virtues of this classic. In fact, at every turn, Alice's new companions scoff at her traditional education. The Mock Turtle, for example, remarks that he took the "regular course" in school: Reeling, Writhing, and branches of Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. Carroll believed John Tenniel's illustrations were as important as his text. Naturally, Carroll's instincts were good; the masterful drawings are inextricably tied to the well-loved story. (All ages) --Emilie Coulter