1925 Donohue Edition - Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Tenniel and Saunders
A striking early American edition of Lewis Carroll’s immortal fantasy, retaining its wonderfully evocative colour pictorial binding and combining John Tenniel’s classic illustrations with distinctive period artwork created especially for this Donohue issue.
Author: Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson].
Title: Alice in Wonderland.
Illustrators: John Tenniel; D. E. Saunders; additional cover artwork tentatively attributed to Charles Bourd.
Publisher: Chicago and New York: M. A. Donohue & Co., no date [1925]. A bibliographic study of illustrated Alice editions held at Case Western Reserve University dates this particular Donohue issue to 1925.
Language: English.
Pages: 256 pages.
Size: 9 x 7 inches.
Binding: Very good and attractive original burgundy cloth binding, with gilt lettering to the spine and a large colour pictorial paste-down to the upper board depicting Alice surrounded by the White Rabbit, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter and other Wonderland characters. The pictorial panel remains remarkably bright and appealing. Light rubbing and age-related wear to the extremities, with minor wear at the spine ends and corners, as shown. Hinges firm and binding sound. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, complete, tight and generally clean, with uniform age-toning and occasional minor spotting or marks consistent with age. A charming contemporary gift inscription, dated Christmas 1931, appears on the front blank, providing an attractive early provenance.
Illustrations: Complete with the forty-two celebrated black-and-white illustrations by John Tenniel, together with a colour frontispiece showing Alice surrounded by animals and striking two-page pictorial endpapers printed in brown. The colour frontispiece is by D. E. Saunders, whose signature also appears on the decorative endpapers. The specially commissioned cover illustration is by a different artist; its signature is difficult to decipher, and a Case Western Reserve University exhibition catalogue tentatively identifies the artist as Charles Bourd.
Estimate: USD 250-300.
The book: An especially attractive 1920s American edition of Alice in Wonderland, distinguished by its large format and splendid colour pictorial binding. Donohue retained Tenniel’s canonical illustrations—the images that have defined Carroll’s Wonderland since the nineteenth century—but supplemented them with new artwork for a contemporary American audience. The resulting volume is both immediately recognisable as Alice and distinctly representative of the richly illustrated children’s books of the interwar period.
The colourful upper cover is particularly effective, gathering many of Wonderland’s best-known inhabitants around a red-haired Alice, while D. E. Saunders’ frontispiece presents a very different interpretation: a blonde Alice in the familiar blue-and-white dress surrounded by an exuberant assembly of animals. The handsome pictorial endpapers, also signed Saunders, add considerably to the decorative character of the edition.
The author: Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), an English writer, mathematician, logician and photographer. First published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland grew from a story Dodgson told to Alice Liddell and her sisters during a boating excursion on the Thames. Its extraordinary mixture of linguistic invention, logic, dream imagery and absurdity transformed children’s literature and has made Alice one of the most enduring figures in world literature.
The illustrator: Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914) was a British illustrator and political cartoonist best remembered today for the forty-two drawings he created for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the later illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass. Working closely with Carroll, Tenniel established the visual identities of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the other inhabitants of Wonderland. His images became inseparable from the text and remain among the most influential illustrations ever created for a children’s book.
Additional artwork: D. E. Saunders created the colour frontispiece and decorative pictorial endpapers for this Donohue edition. The artist responsible for the elaborate colour cover appears to have signed the composition “...Burd”; modern bibliographic research has tentatively suggested Charles Bourd, although the attribution remains uncertain.