2019 Signed First Edition - Alice in Wonderland, Charles van Sandwyk Illustrator
A beautifully produced signed Folio Society edition of Lewis Carroll’s enduring classic, transformed by Charles van Sandwyk’s exquisitely whimsical vision of Wonderland and preserved in fine condition with its original decorated slipcase.
Author: Lewis Carroll.
Illustrator: Charles van Sandwyk.
Title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Publisher: London: The Folio Society, 2019.
Edition: First Trade Edition, First Printing, signed by Charles van Sandwyk. This edition reworks van Sandwyk’s earlier large-format limited edition for the Folio Society, first published in 2015. For this smaller-format edition the artist added new artwork, coloured the title page and chapter-opening initials, and created new pictorial endpapers and additional decorations.
Language: English.
Pages: 148 pages.
Size: 10 x 7 inches.
Binding: Fine original publisher’s dark red cloth binding, lettered in gilt to the spine and decorated to the front board with a triple gilt rule surrounding an inset colour illustration of the White Rabbit. The illustration is framed by an elaborate design of roses, thistles, hearts, a key and crown in black, red and gilt. Housed in the fine original dark slipcase decorated with repeated pocket watches and White Rabbit motifs. An exceptionally fresh copy, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Fine, as new content, bright, tight and clean throughout. Signed in ink by Charles van Sandwyk on the half-title page, as shown. Complete.
Illustrations: Magnificently illustrated throughout by Charles van Sandwyk with eleven listed colour plates, including the frontispiece, together with numerous full-page and smaller line illustrations, coloured “scraps,” ornamental chapter initials, decorations and the wonderful double-page map of Wonderland used as the pictorial endpapers. For this 2019 edition, van Sandwyk also coloured several illustrations previously reproduced in line, added new artwork to pages 22, 63, 91, 110 and 132–133, and supplied a new decoration for page 83. Typeset in Founder’s Caslon and printed on Modigliani Insize Neve paper in Vicenza, Italy.
Estimate: USD 600–700.
The book: A particularly desirable signed copy of the first trade edition of Charles van Sandwyk’s interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Folio Society originally commissioned van Sandwyk to illustrate Carroll’s masterpiece for an elaborate limited edition, first published in 2015. The present 2019 edition brought his extraordinary Wonderland to a more intimate format while allowing the artist to revisit and expand the project with newly coloured and additional illustrations.
Van Sandwyk’s Wonderland is unmistakably his own. His White Rabbit, Alice, Caterpillar, Queen and other inhabitants combine the delicacy of late Victorian book illustration with the artist’s characteristic world of anthropomorphic animals, botanical ornament and gentle eccentricity. The result feels entirely sympathetic to Carroll while remaining one of the most distinctive modern illustrated interpretations of the book.
The illustrator: Charles van Sandwyk is a Canadian artist, writer and book illustrator celebrated for his finely drawn, richly imaginative world of animals, fairies and literary characters. Born in Johannesburg in 1966 and raised in British Columbia, his work reflects the influence of the great illustrators of the Golden Age while retaining an immediately recognizable style of his own. His books and illustrations are collected internationally, and his collaborations with the Folio Society, particularly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows, rank among his most sought-after illustrated books.
The author: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician and photographer. First published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland became one of the defining works of literary fantasy and nonsense, followed in 1871 by Through the Looking-Glass. Its extraordinary combination of verbal play, logic, dream imagery and unforgettable characters has inspired generations of artists and illustrators and made it one of the most enduring works in children’s literature.