1907 Rare 1stED - Alice in Wonderland Illustrated by Bessie Pease Gutmann
An uncommon 1907 Bessie Pease Gutmann edition of Carroll’s classic, complete with its charming color plates and distinctive decorated blue cloth binding.
Author: CARROLL, Lewis (Bessie Pease Gutmann, illustrator).
Title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Publisher: New York, Dodge Publishing Company, 1907.
Edition: First Edition illustrated by Bessie Pease Gutmann.
Language: Text in English.
Pages: 164 pages.
Size: 8 x 6 inches.
Binding: Very good original blue decorated cloth binding, lettered in white and red and featuring the White Rabbit on the front board. Light rubbing and minor marks consistent with age, with slight wear at the spine extremities, as shown. Binding remains sound and attractive. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Good. Complete and firmly bound, with foxing and age toning throughout as shown. The first endpaper shows offsetting from a paper clip which has since been removed. The inner hinge adjoining the frontispiece has been reinforced by a previous owner, as shown. No material loss affecting the completeness of the book.
Illustrations: Complete with all ten color illustrations by Bessie Pease Gutmann, including the color frontispiece, together with decorative illustrations and borders printed throughout the text.
Estimate: USD 250–300.
The book: First published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland follows Alice after she tumbles down a rabbit hole into a world governed by dream logic, wordplay, curious creatures, and wonderfully eccentric characters. Its combination of fantasy, satire, linguistic invention, and nonsense has made it one of the most enduring works of children’s literature and one of the most frequently illustrated books in the English language.
This 1907 Dodge edition is particularly desirable for Bessie Pease Gutmann’s interpretation of the story. Her softly modeled, richly colored illustrations give Alice and the inhabitants of Wonderland a distinctly Edwardian character, while the recurring decorative borders and pictorial endpapers create an unusually cohesive and attractive production.
The illustrator: Bessie Pease Gutmann (1876–1960) was an American artist and illustrator celebrated especially for her portraits of children and for her work in books and popular magazines. During the early twentieth century her illustrations appeared widely in publications including Woman’s Home Companion and McCall’s, making her one of the best-known American commercial illustrators of her generation.
Her 1907 illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland remain among her most collectible book illustrations. Their gentle, painterly character offers a marked contrast to the sharper Victorian imagery associated with earlier editions, giving Carroll’s Wonderland a warm and distinctly turn-of-the-century visual identity.
The author: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, photographer, and Anglican deacon. He is remembered above all for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark.
Carroll’s extraordinary facility with language, paradox, logic, and fantasy gave his work an enduring appeal far beyond children’s literature. The characters and imagery of Wonderland have become part of global popular culture, while the text continues to inspire artists, illustrators, writers, filmmakers, and collectors more than a century and a half after its first appearance.