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.
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.
RU ready? New York author Susan Crimp has written an updated version of Alice’s Adventures entirely in text-speak. Alice’s Adventures in NYC: The text generation is available for Kindle from Amazon with plans for a print edition “soon.” In addition Crimp is working on two similar books, Through The NYC Looking Glass and Great Textpectations, to be published later this year.
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:
Alice – The original Alice wz a 7- year old English school girl who talked like Harry Potter. She wz polite, kind + made people . Alice however didn’t always say th right things + stimes upset many of the people n Wonderland
Modern Day Alice – Our Alice n thz story while encountering th same Wonderland az the original character iz nt British bt American + uses modern + understandable language as opposed 2 long winded waffle…
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.
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.
"Wonderland," By Dallas Piotrowski. Giclée Print, 2004.
Once upon a time an eight-year-old girl living in upstate New York received a birthday present that changed her life. The girl’s name was Joyce and the gift from her paternal grandmother was the 1946 Junior Library edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, illustrated by John Tenniel. It was a match made in literary heaven, from the companionable sight-rhyme of Joyce and Alice to Alice’s idea that there “ought to be a book written about me….And when I grow up I’ll write one,“ a goal her American cousin Joyce shared and fulfilled many times over when she grew up.
In her essay, “First Loves from ‘Jabberwocky’ to ‘After Apple Picking,’” reprinted in The Faith of a Writer (2003), Joyce Carol Oates calls her Grandmother Woodside’s gift “the great treasure of my childhood and the most profound literary influence of my life.” It was “love at first sight,” not only with Alice (“with whom I identified unquestionably”) but with “the phenomenon of Book.” Six years later, Grandmother Woodside gave Joyce her first typewriter, a Remington portable.
On view in the grown-up author’s Princeton study is her artist friend [and LCSNA member!] Dallas Piotrowski’s colorful reworking of the Tenniel sketch showing Alice “opening out like the largest telescope there ever was,” having just eaten the Eat Me cake. The altered Alice has a pencil in one hand and a book in the other and a face not unlike that of the study’s inhabitant. Joyce’s title for the picture of herself as Alice is “Curiouser and Curiouser,” which is what Alice is saying as the cake has its way with her. [...]
Children’s author Lil Chase compiled a list of her favorite made-up words in the Guardian today. What’s interesting is how many of the words, invented fancifully by literary wordsmiths, have simply become normal English words. ‘Muggle,’ from J.K. Rowling, now is used not only to mean “a non-magical person,” but more widely as being a person outside of some specific interest. Lil Chase lists A.A. Milne’s “heffalump,” Orson Welles’ “ungood,” and others, and of course Carroll:
7. Galumphing
After slaying the terrible Jabberwock, the boy in Lewis Carrol’s poem “left it dead, and with its head / he went galumphing back.” It’s thought to be a combination of the words “gallop” and “triumphant”. However, modern-day usage is different: picture a sort of ungainly, graceless way of walking with difficulty, the gait of a grumpy teenager, perhaps; perhaps how you might walk if you were dragging a giant jabberwock’s head.
10. Cromulent
My favourite made up word comes from The Simpsons and it describes all of the words above. It’s “a dubious or made up word, term, or phrase that is entirely plausible because it makes logical sense within existing language conventions”. But it’s best defined by simply quoting the script:
As two teachers stand at the back of the auditorium someone recites Springfield’s motto: A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. Teacher 1:Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield. Teacher 2:I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Cromulent is an amazing word. I can’t believe I didn’t know it before. It’s like the word ‘sesquipedalian,’ which is a long word which means “a long word.”
Callooh! Callay!! We are delighted to announce that the LCSNA has just published a frabjous new book paying tribute to the late, great Martin Gardner–columnist, philosopher, polymath, magician, religious thinker, and author of more than 70 books, including the groundbreaking Annotated Alice.
The LCSNA’s beautiful 234-page hardcover is a delightful portmanteau accomplishment, combining entertaining and heartfelt reminiscences from those who knew Gardner with a traditional festschrift (academic essays written in his honor). The book is introduced by Gardner’s son Jim, and includes contributions from such noted authors as Douglas Hofstadter, Morton N. Cohen, Scott Kim, David Singmaster, Michael Patrick Hearn, Raymond Smullyan, and Robin Wilson, to name but a few. Our book also contains Gardner’s own final, post-”Definitive Edition” addenda to his towering Annotated Alice classic, as well as an authoritative bibliography of Gardner’s Carroll-related writings.
A Bouquet for the Gardener is a must-read for anyone who loves Lewis Carroll, puzzles, logic, math, and great thinking on a wide range of topics. Current members of the LCSNA will be mailed one free copy as a bonus of membership. We are thrilled to be able to make this important book available to the public as well via Amazon (US link; UK link). Members can also buy additional copies on Amazon.
Our thanks to all who contributed to this effort, both on the pages and behind the scenes. It is impossible to overstate the debt we all owe to Martin Gardner. We invite you to join us in saying thank you and in celebrating his remarkable life by reading A Bouquet for the Gardener.
How do you like front cover for the new paperback edition of Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory? (Routledge, $44.95, greatly reduced from the $150.00 hardcover edition.) It pays homage to Henry Holiday’s famous “Ocean-Chart” illustration for Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876), pictured below. (We might add a second question, Doesn’t it ruin the concept of the “perfect and absolute blank” to put something in it?) The collection of essays, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchen, and Chris Perkins, features such groundbreaking articles as “Cartographic representation and the construction of lived worlds: understanding cartographic practice as embodied knowledge” by Amy D. Propen.
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!”
Clare Imholtz reports, with a mini review for a mini book:
Dalmation Press has published a new Disney Alice in Wonderland for children aged 2–4, perhaps, as Dodgson wished for his Nursery Alice, “to be thumbed, to be cooed over,to be dogs’-eared, to be rumpled, to be kissed, by the illiterate, ungrammatical, dimpled Darlings that fill your Nursery with merry uproar…”
This teeny abridged version is a board book about 2.5 by 3 inches and just ten thick pages long. Five pages of text face five pages of illustration. The book reads in toto:
p. 1 Alice follows the White Rabbit into a strange world.
p. 3 She meets twins named Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
p. 5 The Mad Hatter and March Hare have a tea party.
p. 7 Alice meets the Queen of Hearts.
p. 9 Was it all just a dream?
Well, what do you expect for $1.00! This may be available at your local Target.
We know of another 6-inch-tall Alice. In August 2010, we posted “New Media Artist” Jason Huff‘s Auto-summarized version of Through the Looking Glass, from his bookAutoSummarize, for sale here. For this project, he ran famous books of literature through Microsoft Word’s AutoSummarize feature. His TTLG is only 20 words long, and here’s one of his several AAIW, for comparison to the Dalmation book:
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Poor Alice! Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. Alice sighed wearily. Alice asked.
Alice was silent.
‘Yes!’ shouted Alice.
Alice thought to herself.
Alice asked.
Alice’s Evidence
‘I won’t!’ said Alice.
29 words! …but I’m not sure what 2-4 year olds would make of it.
This new “brain-boosting” book by Robert Quine and John Nolan has an amusing title: 106 Impossible Things Before Breakfast ($14.95.) The question is, is it possible to do that many impossible things without pushing breakfast back at least to brunch?
“‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen . . . ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Could there be a knife that never dulls? A gun with no moving parts? A broken clock that tells time?
Here, Dr. Michael Laufer and John Nolan reply, “Of course!” Through these conundrums, they show how to unleash the creative energies of the brain to solve even the knottiest enigmas. For instance, one could:
Reinterpret the problem
Change the rules
Change the solution
Whether it’s showering without water, driving a car without an engine, or using a computer without electricity, these are high-level challenges for breakout thinking. With this book, you’ll stretch your minds and be primed to solve the next “impossible” problem before lunchtime.
. Alice however didn’t always say th right things + stimes upset many of the people n Wonderland
Dalmation Press has published a new Disney Alice in Wonderland for children aged 2–4, perhaps, as Dodgson wished for his Nursery Alice, “to be thumbed, to be cooed over,to be dogs’-eared, to be rumpled, to be kissed, by the illiterate, ungrammatical, dimpled Darlings that fill your Nursery with merry uproar…”
“Alice laughed. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’