Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" have captivated the imagination of adults and children alike since they first appeared more than a hundred years ago. Since that time many artists have attempted to capture their dreamlike combination of impossible events, precise detail and weird logic. Mervyn Peake is one of the few to have succeeded. Famed worldwide for his Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake was also an illustrator of rare and wondrous talent, whose editions of "Treasure Island" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are universally admired. In the 1940s, he was commissioned to produce a set of 70 pen-and-ink drawings to accompany Lewis Carroll's two classics, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass". They are among his best work as an illustrator. Unavailable in any edition since 1978, these extraordinary illustrations, many of which were drawn on poor quality wartime paper, have been restored to their former clarity and crispness by a combination of old-fashioned craft and the latest computer technology. They are now meticulously reproduced, for the first time, as they were meant to be seen.This exquisite two-volume set is the first edition to do justice to two great English eccentrics.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), or Lewis Carroll as he was better known, was a lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford University when he wrote Alice in Wonderland (1865), and later Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) for Alice Liddell. Mervyn Peake (1911-68) was an artist and writer. In addition to Treasure Island and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he also illustrated Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm and The Hunting of the Snark. His novels include the Gormenghast trilogy - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone - and Mr Pye.