Yesterday’s Cul de Sac for you amusement. Courtesy of GoComics.
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Tidying up some loose ends from 2011, I found a couple of books that still deserve a mention. Comics and crosswords – what more do you need on a Saturday?
 Pearls Before Swine collection by Stephan Pastis
Larry in Wonderland: A Pearls before Swine Collection gathers together almost a year’s worth of Stephan Pastis’s bizarre parliament of animals. In these strips, which ran between August 2009 and May 2010, Pastis really had fun with a Wonderland theme, introducing such characters as the Mad Ducker, Cheshire Snuffles, Tweedledum Pig, and Tweedledee Idiot Pig. The book is currently only $6.49 on Amazon. Mad Hatter Crosswords reproduces 75 puzzles from the New York Times. An admirably dedicated reviewer has identified them as the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday crosswords published between January 2009 and April 2010. The Mad Hatter connection doesn’t seem to go beyond the cover illustration, through it is true that crosswords go very well with tea.  NYT Mad Hatter Crosswords The collection is published by St. Martin’s Griffin and is available from Amazon for $7.99.
 Tate Publishing, 2011 The catalog for the Tate Liverpool’s Alice in Wonderland exhibition is now for sale on the Tate’s website. Edited by Gavin Delahunty, head of exhibitions and displays at Tate Liverpool, and Christoph Schulz, curator of the exhibition, it reproduces the art of the exhibition in 120 color illustrations. Also included are critical essays by Dame Gillian Beer, Alberto Manguel, and Edward Wakeling, and a new fairy tale by Carol Mavor. Reviews of the exhibition have been published by Adrian Searle and Mariana Warner in the UK’s Guardian and by Lindsay Duguid in the Financial Times. Related events at the Liverpool Tate gallery in late November and early January are listed here. The exhibition ends on January 29.
 Art preview from CBR for Raven Gregory's forthcoming Alice in Wonderland. Graphic novelist Raven Gregory has now written several installments in the Wonderland universe, beginning with Return to Wonderland (2007) and followed by various Tales and Escapes. The original Return to Wonderland followed Alice Liddell’s granddaughter Calie, but according to Comic Book Resources, “the fate of Wonderland’s original protagonist has been remained untold, until now.” So the prequel, called Alice in Wonderland, will star an Alice Liddell bustier and blonder than you’ve ever seen her. Zenoscope will release it in December with covers by Artgerm, Eric Basaluda and Nei Ruffino.
There’s also an interview with Gregory at Comic Book Resources: CBR News: Raven, before “Alice in Wonderland,” you had sent your time following the escapades of Alice’s granddaughter Calie in Wonderland. In fact, this is the first time you’ve actually visited the original character of Alice. What prompted the change in focus? Raven Gregory: We’d been talking about doing the “Alice” story for quite some time, but we all agreed we’d only do it if we had a really good story to tell. After how well the “Wonderland” trilogy turned out, the last thing we wanted to do was to run this thing into the ground. We decided the only way to do it was to wait for the right story to come along, one that would be able to stand on its own merits yet also play into this massive mythology we’ve developed over the last five years. [continue reading.]
 Prof. Richard Jenkyns Issue 187 of Prospect Magazine contains a good article on the influence of the Alice books written by Richard Jenkyns, professor of Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. The article is free to read on Prospect’s website. Jenkyns makes several interesting points that may get LCSNA members thinking and, perhaps, arguing. Here are some extracts:
There is a new children’s book about Tony Sarg, master puppeteer and inventor of the first balloons for New York’s Macy Day Parade. Sarg was also the creator of Tony Sarg’s Treasure Book – an early “mechanical book” with sliding illustrations and removable pieces. The Alice in Wonderland chapter, demonstrated in the video below, is clearly an important ancestor of last year’s interactive e-book for iPad. Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade, written and illustrated by Melissa Sweet, is published by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children and priced at $11.55.
In Crimp’s story, a descendant of Alice falls down a rabbit hole near the Alice statue in Central Park, has an adventure in Wonderland and then records the story on her cellphone in between classes, with help from her BF. The book includes a glossary (“offered 4 u in case u r lost 4 words”), and a cast of characters. Here’s an extract from the latter:
Ok, but is this modern + understandable language all that it seems? I’m suspicious that Crimp has taken a few liberties with text speak. The phrase “as opposed 2 long winded waffle” doesn’t seem particularly thumb-friendly, and why is the word “the” sometimes abbreviated and sometimes not? Excerpts from the book’s glossary, also available on Amazon, suggest either that the text messages of 7 year olds have reached Byzantine maturity, or else that Crimp has made some judicious additions to the stock vocabulary: are the teenagers of Manhattan really texting each other “OBE” (overcome by events), “AWGTHTGTTAG” (are we going to have to go through this again?) or, my favorite, “BHA” (bring him Advil)? I hope so, I’m just not sure. Reviews of the book can be read on The Village Voice and DNAinfo.com. Better still, we would love it if someone with a Kindle would buy the story (only $5.99!) and send us a review for this blog. We would be yr BFF.
 AAIW illustrated by Harry Rountree The new handsome facsimile of the Harry Rountree Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a notable provenance: the type specimen for this imprint was borrowed from the library of LCSNA president Mark Burstein. Originally published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in 1901, the book has been freshly typeset but includes all 92 of Rountree’s watercolors. It is published by Dover Publication’s Calla Editions and is available from Dover for $40. See if you can’t dig up a copy of the August 2011 Princeton Magazine. There’s a good cover feature by Stuart Mitchner called “Alice’s American Cousin,” about author Joyce Carol Oates and her lifelong love of Alice.
 Dame Gillian Beer In the last edition of the Knight Letter we noted that Dame Gillian Beer, King Edward Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Cambridge, had delivered a lecture entitled “Alice in Time” last March at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Now you can read a short review of the lecture in the online version of the Radcliff Magazine. Beer discussed Carroll’s preoccupation with time as one reason for the Alice books’ enduring popularity; she also remarked on the upcoming anniversary: “The 150th anniversary of the first Alice book won’t occur for several more years, but ‘if people are getting primed already,’ Beer said, ‘Lord knows what will happen in 2015.’” We’ll take that as a challenge, then. |
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. Alice however didn’t always say th right things + stimes upset many of the people n Wonderland