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 Illustration by Francis Carruthers Gould from "The Westminster Alice" Two more curiosities from the generous house of Evertype Publishers:
The Westminster Alice, by Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), and illustrated by Francis Carruthers Gould, New Edition 2010.
These political parody vignettes were first brought together in 1903 in the Westminster Popular, and then published again with forward and footnotes in 1927. This edition provides additional historical background and photographs of the Victorians lampooned. Amazon.com, $12.95
New Adventures of Alice, by John Rae, New Edition 2010.
John Rae, author, illustrator and portraitist from New Jersey, really wished that Lewis Carroll had written a sequel to Through the Looking-Glass, so he wrote and illustrated one himself. Published first in 1917, these new adventures see Alice visit a number of Mother Goose characters. Amazon.com, $21.95
 Masters of Technique, Mongoose Press In April this year, Mongoose Press released the “first ever” anthology of contemporary chess fiction. Subscribers to our Yahoo news group will already know that one of the stories was written by LCSNA-member and novelist Katherine Neville. Neville’s story featuring Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson sits alongside other stories diverse in genre and inspiration. Other contributors include Steven Carter, author of the New York Times best-seller Emperor of Ocean Park, and Paul Eggers, former United States Chess Federation master.
A lengthy review of the book, written by Sean Gonsalves, is now available on ChessCafe.com. In Howard’s Gambit, Gonsalves provides some interesting back story to the book and its editor Howard Goldowsky. He also reviews some of the contributions. For serious chess aficionados, let down in the past by implausible fictional chess, Gonsalves offers the following reassurance:
… for all you expert chess players out there, the icing on the cake with MOT is the realistic description of actual chess moves in each of the twelve stories, unlike the impossible positions found in lots of pulp chess fiction.
To wit, from Patrick Somerville’s short story, The Game I Once Enjoyed:
“There was a fork on his next turn – king and bishop – but I had to get my queen out of the way of the long diagonal he’d opened up in his last turn, another little something I had missed. He’d be up a piece, whichever way I went to save my queen. So be it, I thought. Been here before. I reached forward to move, but stopped.” More…
Masters of Technique: Mongoose Chess Anthology of Chess Fiction (Hardcover) can be purchased from the Mongoose Press ($24.95) or from Amazon ($17.96). Proceeds from the book will go to support chess schools and clubs.
 Campfire Graphic Novels, a publishing house out of New Dehli, India, released their Alice in Wonderland this week, as part of their large and expanding series of comic versions of classics, biographies, mythology, and originals. The adaptation (72 pages, full color) is by Lewis Helfand with art by Rajesh Nagulakonda (who has previously illustrated their Joan of Arc, The Time Machine, and Oliver Twist.) Campfire’s mission statement: “It is night-time in the forest. A campfire is crackling, and the storytelling has begun. In the warm, cheerful radiance of the campfire, the storyteller’s audience is captivated. Inspired by this enduring relationship between a campfire and gripping storytelling, we bring you four series of Campfire Graphic Novels…” A noble cause, but isn’t reading comic books by firelight a bit hard on the eyes?
Campfire’s Alice in Wonderland is for sale on their website for $9.99 with free shipping worldwide!
Several LCSNA members have noticed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland featured in magazine advertisements for something called 100 Classic Books. Gary Brockman describes one ad thus: “Against a background of bookshelves packed with mostly leather-bound volumes, a pair of manicured hands holds open an electronic reader. On the left ‘page’ are the last lines of ‘All in a Golden Afternoon’ (there not being room for an entire stanza) and on the right page the beginning of Chapter 1 of AAIW (there not being room for the entire first sentence). The ad copy reads in part: ‘Own an instant library of 100 of the greatest books ever written, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Hound of the Baskervilles.’”
The list price is $19.99 for Nintendo DS (a latter-day Gameboy), and is exactly what it says it is: 100 classic books that you can read on your Nintendo DS. How comfortable these little hand-held gaming devices are for reading full novels is open for debate. But how excellent would it be to find that the teenager zoned out on his gameboy at a restaurant is not rescuing princesses (‘princi‘?) but instead reading Don Quixote? I’ve seen young people huddled around tiny iPod screens to watch full length movies, so the idea of having a hundred classic books in miniature at your disposal for long trips might not be entirely claustrophobic to the right demographic.
From the blurb at Nintendo.com:
The postage stamp-sized game card includes a variety of books for all different ages, including seven separate works by Charles Dickens. There are novels that people can enjoy on the beach, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; adventure and mystery novels that can be devoured during summer travels, such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle or Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and books that kids can read at home, such as The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
 Image from Atomic Antelope's Alice iPad app There’s more discussion on the Alice pop-up book app for the iPad (originally mentioned here in the post Through the LED Screen). The Atomic Antelope app ($9, or a free demo) is the original Carroll text with interactive animated illustrations based on Tenniel. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy is ruminating on all of this over at the Guardian this week.
…But this is nothing compared to Alice for the iPad. You can throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts, help the Caterpillar smoke his hookah pipe, make Alice grow as big as a house and then shrink again. You can watch as “the Mad Hatter gets even madder”, and throw pepper at the Duchess. Over the 52 pages of the app there are 20 animated scenes. Each illustration has been taken from the original book and has been made gravity-aware, responding to a shake, tilt or the touch of a finger. The story is never the same twice, because users are Alice’s guide through Wonderland. The Caterpillar will smoke his hookah in a new way when you tilt your iPad, or you can throw more pepper the second time around.
continue reading…
 John Bull's Adventures in Fiscal Wonderland, a new edition from Evertype Last month saw two new publications from Evertype, veritable fount of Alice parodies, translations, and rare reprints. (See the complete catalog here.)
John Bull’s Adventures in Fiscal Wonderland, by Charles Geake and Francis Carruthers Gould is a parody of late 19th century British economic politics, originally published in 1904. Publisher Michael Everson reassures readers that no specialist knowledge of either the Tariff Reform League or the Free Food League is required in order to enjoy John Bull’s adventures. (Amazon.com, $12.95)
 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a Manx translation by Brian Stowell Contoyrtyssyn Ealish ayns Çheer ny Yindyssyn is the third edition of Brian Stowell’s Manx translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Amazon.com, $15.95). Manx, the language of the Isle of Man, is a close relation of Irish and Scottish Gaelic but with a very different orthography. Tragically, no native Manx speakers remain, but the language is the subject of dedicated revival efforts – to which this book will contribute, we hope.
Would-be travelers in a Manx Wonderland might like to practice the following phrases (extracted from Stowell’s translation):
Ta mish keoi – I’m mad
T’ou uss keoi – You’re mad
Ta shin ooilley keoi ayns shoh – We’re all mad here
Ta’n jees oc keoi – They’re both mad
In these circumstances, the book takes the well-deserved liberty of “localizing” a few of Tenniel’s illustrations: apparently the label on Alice’s bottle reads “IU MEE,” for example. But, inquiring minds want to know, does the Cheshire Cat have a tail? Has he been transformed into a Manx cat? Surely one of that curious tail-less breed, with back legs longer than his front legs and a wonderful associated terminology, would feel right at home in Wonderland? (Quiz: Is the cat below a “dimple rumpy, a “rumpy riser,” or a “stumpy”? Visit Our-Cats.com to find out.)
 A Manx cat, naturally tail-free (Image from Our-Cats.com)
 The Folio Society The Folio Society has published a facsimile of the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures under Ground. The print run will be limited to 3,750 hand-numbered copies, each clad in goat skin and gold and priced at $179.95.
The edition comes with a companion booklet describing the adventures of the manuscript itself, authored by Sally Brown, Curator of Modern Manuscripts at the British Library and the lucky custodian of the precious original.
 Carroll's Queen of Hearts
 Lewis Carroll: Voices From France by Elizabeth Sewell LCSNA’s 2008 publication of Dr. Elizabeth Sewell’s scholarly study Lewis Carroll: Voices from France has been noted in the Times Literary Supplement of May 7, 2010. The review itself is mixed; the reviewer comments that the book has many fine aperçus and admires its close readings, but objects to some of the qualities that we most enjoyed, such as her “speculative flights” and “insouciance.” Also, Sewell was in her late seventies when she wrote this book, not nearly ninety, as he suggests.
If you would like to pit your critical wit against the TLS, you can purchase the book from this very website! Click on the link to “All Publications” in the top menu bar.
Michael Everson released six Carroll books in 2009 from his publishing company Evertype, starting with the Irish AAIW, Eachtraí Eilíse, and continues now with more new unique oddities. All this exciting activity is causing Mark Burstein to wax Borgesian about La biblioteca de Babel:
Borges and others have spoken of a universal library; for our purposes, let us imagine an enormous set of the two canonical Alice books, all with matching covers and identically formatted with the Tenniel illustrations, each being in one the ninety or more languages into which they have been translated. Michael Everson is moving in that direction with matching editions of the books in, thus far, English, Irish, Cornish, German, and Esperanto, and soon he promises French, Italian, and Swedish, as well as the constructed language Lojban. Aside from the new translations (Irish, Cornish), the European languages (Michael is fluent in six) are taken from the first editions, but romanized (in the case of the German Fraktur) and modernized in terms of spelling and, occasionally, vocabulary, the goal of which is to have thoroughly readable texts for modern readers.
 (That continuing-to-evolve ‘Burstein on Everson’ essay will appear in a future Knight Letter.)
Mrs. J. C. Gorham (who will be known to history only by her husband’s name!) created a series of books using only one syllable words, including Gulliver’s Travels (1896) and Black Beauty (1905). “Having read the Gulliver’s Travels retelling,” writes Mr. Everson, “I can say that it is a fine example of monosyllabic writing [...]. Although Mrs Gorham ‘cheats’ rather a bit more than this in her 1905 retelling of Alice—her style is still both vigorous and enjoyable. It is for this reason that Mrs Gorham’s ‘Alice imitation’ (to use Carolyn Sigler’s term) deserves to be put back into print.” You can see what he means by ‘cheats’ (as I did in my attempt at a monosyllabic title to this blog post) in this excerpt:
“Do you like your size now?” asked the Cat-er-pil-lar.
“It is a good height, in-deed!” said the Cat-er-pil-lar, and reared it-self up straight as it spoke (it was just three inch-es high).
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Retold in words of one syllable (Evertype, $11.95, available on Amazon.com).
 The other new offerings are two fresh reprints of the Boer War-era political parodies, Caroline Lewis’s Clara in Blunderland and its sequel Lost in Blunderland, originally published in 1902 and each being sold for $12.95. Why is this dated comedy being dragged from the vaults? “I should make it clear that I am not a student of early twentieth-century British politics—but I’m not publishing this book because of its value to the study of that time and place,” writes Everson. “I’m publishing it because it’s a splendid parody, amusing both for what it parodies as for its reflection of Carroll’s original.”
All of Everson’s Evertype Alice books can be perused at alice-in-wonderland-books.com.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are, I understand, to be published for the first time in German. When I first learned this important fact, it surprised me for a moment, for I had thought that both these classics had by this time passed into all civilized tongues; but after some little reflection, I soon realized that if they had been popular in Germany, we should have known about it. It is not difficult to imagine what will happen when the Alice books are well known there, for we know what happened to Shakespeare. A cloud of commentators with gather, and a thousand solemn Teutons will sit down to write huge volumes of comment and criticism; they will contrast and compare the characters (there will even be a short chapter on Bill the Lizard), and will offer numerous conflicting interpretations of the jokes. After that, Freud and Jung and their followers will inevitably arrive upon the scene, and they will give us appalling volumes on Sexualtheorie of Alice in Wonderland, on the Assoziationsfähigkeit und Assoziationsstudien of Jabberwocky, on the inner meaning of the conflict between Tweedledum and Tweedledee from the psychoanalytische und psychopathologische points of view.
-J.B. Priestley, “A Note on Humpty Dumpty”, 1921.
 While Priestley was prophetically correct about the imminent psycho-analysis of Wonderland (and, obviously, not just by Germans), he was incorrect about that being the first German translation published in the 1920s. Antonie Zimmermann’s translation of Alice’s Abenteuer im Wunderland was published in 1869, the first ever translation of Alice into another language. Michael Everson is taking the considerable risk (according to Priestley) exposing the classic tale to Germans once again by re-publishing the original Zimmermann. (His wonderful Evertype publishing house released nine Carroll titles in 2009, and is so far sparing no moments this year with some new fascinating versions, parodies, and rare translations – - more at alice-in-wonderland-books.com.) Aus dem Klappentext:
Lewis Carroll ist ein Pseudonym. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson war der eigentliche Name des Autors; er war Dozent für Mathematik am Christ Church College in Oxford. Dodgson begann die Geschichte am 4. Juli 1862 bei einer Ruderpartie auf der Themse in Oxford, zusammen mit Pfarrer Robinson Duckworth, mit Alice Liddell (zehn Jahre) – der Tochter des Dekans der Christ Church –, und mit ihren beiden Schwestern Lorina (dreizehn Jahre) und Edith (acht Jahre). Wie man dem Gedicht am Anfang des Buches entnehmen kann, baten die drei Mädchen Dodgson um eine Geschichte und, zunächst widerwillig, begann er, ihnen die erste Version dieser Geschichte zu erzählen. Es gibt im Text des Buches, das schließlich im Jahre 1865 veröffentlicht wurde, viele versteckte Bezüge zu den fünf Personen.
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