1920 Rare Book - Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Margaret W. Tarrant
An attractive and complete 1920s edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, richly illustrated with Margaret W. Tarrant’s celebrated suite of 48 colour illustrations and retaining its charming original pictorial cloth binding.
Author: Lewis Carroll.
Title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Publisher: London and Melbourne: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, no date [circa 1928].
Edition: Early edition illustrated by Margaret W. Tarrant, from Ward, Lock’s “Prince Charming Colour Books for Children” series. This pictorial cloth issue is bibliographically associated with the late 1920s.
Language: English.
Pages: xvi, 332 pages, plus publisher’s catalogue.
Size: 8 x 6.5 inches.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s grey-green cloth binding, with black-stamped titles and decorative framing to the front board, centred with an oval colour pictorial onlay of Alice and the White Rabbit. Black-stamped titles and decorative design to the spine. Light general wear, rubbing and age toning, particularly to the spine and extremities, as shown. Binding sound and attractive. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Good to very good content, complete and generally well preserved. A small chip and one tear to the upper margins of the first two leaves, including the title page, have been neatly repaired by a previous owner, as shown. Scattered foxing and age toning, predominantly to the outer margins and page edges, with the illustrated plates generally remaining bright and attractive.
Illustrations: Complete with the full suite of 48 colour illustrations by Margaret W. Tarrant, including the striking pictorial endpapers. Tarrant’s delicate watercolours depict Alice, the White Rabbit, the Dodo, the Queen of Hearts and the other inhabitants of Wonderland in her distinctive early twentieth-century style.
Estimate: $300–400 USD.
The book:
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland first appeared in 1865 and rapidly became one of the defining works of English children’s literature. Its extraordinary combination of fantasy, verbal play, absurdity and dream logic has inspired generations of artists, and illustrated editions have become an important collecting field in their own right.
Margaret Tarrant’s interpretation first appeared with Ward, Lock in 1916 and became one of the enduring visual treatments of Carroll’s story. This later Prince Charming issue is particularly appealing for retaining the extensive suite of colour artwork, including the wonderful double-page pictorial endpapers, together with the publisher’s distinctive pictorial cloth binding.
The author:
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was an English mathematician, logician, photographer and writer. Best remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll created a literary world in which logic and language are continually overturned, producing stories whose humour and imaginative strangeness continue to appeal to both children and adults.
The illustrator:
Margaret Winifred Tarrant (1888–1959) was a British artist and book illustrator especially admired for her delicate watercolours of children, fairies and literary subjects. Her illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, first published by Ward, Lock in 1916, became among her best-known works, combining soft colour, graceful figures and a distinctly Edwardian sense of fantasy.