Nov. 20-Dec. 18: 'We are all Mad'
Library exhibition marks 150th anniversary of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'
9 a.m., Nov. 19, 2015--The University of Delaware Library is mounting a one-case Special Collections exhibit, “‘We are all Mad’: The 150th Anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” from Nov. 20 until Dec. 18 on the first floor of the Morris Library.
Lewis Carroll’s immortal tale of a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole has not only delighted children and adults for a century and a half, but also been translated into nearly 200 languages and been the subject of illustration, scholarship, parody and pastiche.
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The exhibition features a recent library acquisition, the rare edition of Alice’s Adventures Underground. This is a facsimile of the manuscript draft of the novel, which Carroll wrote and illustrated and gave to Alice Liddell, to whom he first told the story on a summer afternoon in 1863.
The facsimile was commissioned in 1936 by Delawarean Eldridge R. Johnson (1867-1945), who had purchased the original manuscript from famed Philadelphia bookseller A.S.W. Rosenbach in 1928.
Johnson, co-founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company and one of the richest men in America, was a great admirer of Carroll’s Alice books. The extraordinary facsimile – almost indistinguishable for the original – was made in Vienna and distributed to Johnson’s circle of friends. Only about 50 copies were known to have been produced.
The exhibition will accompany the lecture, “His Master’s Voice and Alice: Eldridge Johnson’s Adventure with Lewis Carroll’s Alice Manuscript,” which will take place in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 1. The speaker will be August A. Imholz Jr., an internationally recognized authority on Carroll, and past president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. For more information about the lecture, a flyer can be found at this website.
The exhibition includes several other versions of Carroll’s beloved text: the 1866 American issue of the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; a 1930 edition of the text published by the Black Sun Press in Paris, featuring color lithographs by Marie Laurencin; and Alice in Plunderland, a very recent adaptation of the story by poet Steve McCaffery, with illustrations by Clelia Scala.
The exhibition is curated by Curtis Small Jr., assistant librarian in the Special Collections Department, and Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow in the Special Collections Department, in the University of Delaware Library.
An online version of the exhibit will also be available.