NEW BOOK: Michael Hancher: The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, 2nd edition (2019)
From: Michael Hancher <mh@umn.edu>
Subject: New book-history book
I'm happy to report the publication of a book-history project that has a couple of Harvard connections: first, the fact that I was educated there ('63); and then the fact that many of its illustrations are from the Houghton Library. The book is the second edition, much enlarged, of The Tenniel Illustrations to the "Alice" Books (1985). The OSU Press description of the new edition is at:
The original twelve chapters have been thoroughly updated, including one on Carroll's skillful layouts, which first appeared in the Harvard Library Bulletin (https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427334893$7i). Several new chapters discuss the manufacture and printing of electrotypes made from wood engravings, an important technical aspect of Victorian book production that has been neglected until now. Tenniel and Carroll notoriously suppressed the first printing of Alice's Adventures, offended by its defects (ironically making an extraordinary prize out of any surviving copy), and these new chapters explain what went wrong. Other new chapters discuss the coloring of the illustrations in later editions, and the unusual circumstances of the production of the two Limited Editions Club Alice books.