It is with great sadness we report that our beloved Morton Cohen passed away on June 12. A founding member of our Society, his contributions to Carrollian scholarship cannot be overstated, but a partial list follows. Morton Norton Cohen was born in Calgary, Canada, and grew up on the North Shore of Boston. He was educated at Tufts College and Columbia University, and became a Professor of English at City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as well as teaching at West Virginia, Syracuse, and Rutgers Universities; a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, and a member of the Royal Society of Literature. The Modern Language Association set up the biennial Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters in 1989. Aside from his books on Carroll, he also produced significant works on Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard. For many years, Dr. Cohen “triangulated,” as he called it, spending the academic year in New York, the summers in London, and whenever possible winter periods in Puerto Rico. His warm and genial presence at our meetings will be sorely missed.

The New York Times published an obituary online on July 4, a date that would please him (being the 155th anniversary of the boat trip up the Isis), written by Richard Sandomir, husband of our own Patt Griffin. The article appeared in print the next day.

Partial Bibliography

• The Letters of Lewis Carroll, Oxford, 1979 (with Roger Lancelyn Green)
• Lewis Carroll and the Kitchins, Argosy Bookstore, 1980
• Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan, Cambridge , 1987
• Lewis Carroll, Photographer of Children: Four Nude Studies, Clarkson N. Potter/Crown, 1988
• Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections, University of Iowa, 1989
• Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Macmillan, 1995
• Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer, Aperture, 1998
• Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators: Collaborations and Correspondence, 1865–1898, 2003 (with Edward Wakeling)
• (His introductions to various books, and academic articles, are too voluminous to list.)

Leaving aside the ironies of a YouTube channel devoted to yoga and meditation, episodes of British personality Jaime’s popular channel “Cosmic Kids Yoga” takes on various themes (Star Wars, Frozen, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.) to encourage children to practice spiritual disciplines. It was inevitable that one was based on Alice in Wonderland.

Who needs words? Chicago artist Nicholas Rougeux’s Between the Words project is “an exploration of visual rhythm of punctuation in well-known literary works. All letters, numbers, spaces, and line breaks were removed from entire texts of classic stories like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick, and Pride and Prejudice—leaving only the punctuation in one continuous line of symbols in the order they appear in texts, [which] was arranged in a spiral, starting at the top center, with markings for each chapter and a classic illustration at the center.”

Alice and the other posters come in various sizes (from 4 x 6 to 40 x 60 inches) and papers, which can be ordered through Zazzle.

It is certainly a unique way of looking at the classic text.

The talk by Mark Burstein and Jim Gardner given at the 2016 Gathering4Gardner has been posted to their YouTube channel. It was a shortened version of Mark’s “What IS It about Alice” talk, with extended emphasis on how the 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of The Annotated Alice came into being.