Title: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Publisher: MacMillan & Co.
Publication Date: 1870
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: 5th or later Edition
Twenty-fifth Thousand. 192 pages + [1] page adverts. Frontispiece with tissue guard and 41 other illustrations by John Tenniel. Twenty-fifth Thousand. London: Macmillan and Co., 1870. Original red cloth with cover vignettes in gilt, all page edges gilt. The odd very slight mark in an otherwise clean text (the exception on 74-5 where a very small historic brown mark effects the very top of the margin). Early Edition (sixth printing overall), of one of the landmark books of the 19th Century. The book was initially published in London in 1865, so dated, but John Tenniel was dissatisfied with the printing of his illustrations, so the book was held off the market (except for a very few copies, now bringing six figures); the 1865 copies were shipped to Appleton in New York, who issued them with their own title leaves dated 1866. There was then a new London printing dated 1866 (copies of either of these 1866 printings can now bring $50,000+). Over the coming years, there were numerous additional printings, still in the same-style binding, including this one: as quoted in WM&G, The authoritative Bibliographical Catalogue of Macmillan & Co.'s publications. informs us that that the first edition [which became the first American edition] was published in 1865, the second [the first English edition to be published as such] in 1866, the third in 1867, the fourth in Feb. 1868, and the fifth from electrotype plates in Oct. 1868. The Sixth edition (eighteenth thousand) in 1869. Clearly, the copies of a single printing were divided up into several separate Thousands. This copy dated 1870 reads "Twenty-fifth Thousand . This is a very good copy: the red cloth is generally a bit faded, and there is wear to the front lower hinge and back lower half of the hinge, but there is much less wear than is typically the case (very minor rubbing at some extremities). The original dark endpapers are clean and intact, except for tiny corner nibbles at the back endpaper and lower corner of the last printed page, 191. This is in its original binding style and with the original Tenniel illustrations, but at a price massively less than an 1866 copy. See Williams Madan & Green pp 27-31.On 3rd September 1866, Lewis Carroll wrote that Macmillan "is now printing 3,000 more Alices; by the end of 1867 I hope to be about clear, if not actually in pocket by it" . In his diary of 8th January 1869, Carroll said "Macmillan tells me that Alice has had a great sale this Christmas, more than 3,000 having been sold since June!" Far from being a monetary failure, as Carroll feared, he found that Alice was bringing him in a very considerable income growing stronger year-on-year. This classic story was thought up by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pseudonym Lewis Carroll) on a summer's day on the river Isis near Oxford. Seller Inventory # 5121