The Times Special Report:

June 2 1998

Books: A century after his death, Lewis Carroll books are much in demand by collectors

Lasting appeal of a master storyteller

The 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's death is rather late to begin collecting him in earnest, and books for sticky little fingers tend not to survive in a good state. But looking out for a single author around the ABA fair is one way to explore this newly expanded event - and the copies of Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark just discernible on the cover of the catalogue are a good omen for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

David and Denise Carlson (D & D of New Jersey) are working on a reference book listing the Carrolliana - letters, manuscripts, books from his library and so on - sold at auction since 1893. It will run to more than 3,000 items.

Nevertheless, to find 12 or 15 presentation copies for sale under one roof is remarkable. For L50,000 you could buy more Carroll at Olympia than you could carry.

For a $16,000 start (L10,750), the Carlsons are offering a second edition of Doublets: A Word-Puzzle bearing a presentation inscription to one of the two dedicatees, Julia Arnold (a grand-daughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby and later the mother of Aldous Huxley). Julia and her sister Ethel had inspired Carroll to invent the game of forming links between two words: HEAD, heal, teal, tell, tall, TAIL.

But the links must be decorous. Words that some players had tried to get away with inspired a riff of scornful nonsense from Carroll, who wrote that he felt "quite unable to sweal the chaffy spelt, to sile the pory cole, or to swill a spate from a piny ait to the song of the spink". But though he makes play of them, words were a serious business in Victorian Oxford. The real Alice's father, Henry Liddell, was a lexicographer, and in the year Carroll invented Doublets, 1879, James Murray first drew his salary as editor of the great Oxford English Dictionary (which is capacious enough to include all those words and Carroll's own "Jabberwock").

Carroll intended to compile a book of his puzzles, but never did. Twenty-five years ago, John Fisher filled the gap with The Magic of Lewis Carroll, which includes conjuring tricks of the period and shows how convoluted and intricate this particular magician's mind could be. Look out at the fair, also, for the grand two-volume edition of Carroll's letters edited by Morton N. Cohen (1979).

Good biographies include those by Cohen, Anne Clark, Derek Hudson and Stuart Dodgson Collingwood - but avoid those by Langford Reed and Walter de la Mare.

Bromlea Books will be showing a range of Carroll items, including a set of LPs and a presentation copy of the manuscript facsimile of Alice's Adventures Underground which appeared in 1886. George Robert Kane has an inscribed Phantasmagoria and is asking L2,300. Children's specialists M & D Reeve of Oxford have an Alice panorama with moving pictures from about 1915, and would not look uffish at L695.

Simon Finch has yet another presentation copy to one of the little girls Carroll liked to photograph in those days of irrecoverable innocence: a Snark for L3,000. Other Snarks in his special red binding are at Books and Things (L750, rather rubbed) and Nigel Williams (L2,975, inscribed on publication day in 1876).

But the great prizes are, of course, the Alices. Adrian Harrington, who has a new shop in Kensington Church Street, is offering the first edition of Wonderland from America, where it appeared earlier than in England, using the sheets printed by Oxford University Press in 1865 which Sir John Tenniel condemned as "disgraceful".

An overwritten footnote about the matter in the Letters concludes: "Both Dodgson and Tenniel would be stunned to know that a single copy of that 'inferior' first edition brings thousands of pounds when it comes up for sale. So choice a book has it become that collectors would trade whole segments of their libraries for a single copy of the 'first' Alice, bibliographers dream of uncovering an unrecorded copy, and literary chroniclers are at a loss to explain how, even in the heyday of Victorian publishing, such extravagant decisions could be made over a single children's book." The note goes on to give seven bibliographical references to such places as The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Harrington, who would part with his "single copy" for L2,750, is a lot calmer, describing it as "scarce", which - as John Carter's ABC for Book-Collectors explains - is a more modest claim than rare, exceedingly or notoriously rare, or (the trump) unrecorded and apparently unique. This is just as well, because there will be two other copies of the American Wonderland at the fair. Snicker-snack.

Harrington is among several dealers with English firsts of Alice. His copies, both restored, are offered for L3,250, but prices vary a lot. My copy of Looking-Glass cost less than L100, but needs to go to the binder. As the sequel to an established favourite, it had a longer print run, and so is always cheaper than Wonderland. In 1988, the Rocket Press printed all of Tenniel's Alice illustrations for the first time direct from the engraved woodblocks. Several sets were divided by dealers, so plates of this exquisite work appear regularly.

Of the many interpretations of Carroll by later illustrators, Barry Moser's Pennyroyal Edition is the most lavish, and unslavish, being boldly American and quite unlike Tenniel. The limited edition is unwieldy and exorbitant, but it was beautifully reprinted by the University of California Press in 1983.

It is said that Lewis Carroll is more often quoted in Parliament than anyone but Shakespeare. A newspaper columnist who tries to see Europe's political topsy-turvydom right-side-up tells me that he can compare its goings on only with Orwell, Kafka and Wonderland. Nigel William's fair inventory describes John Bull's Adventures in the Fiscal Blunderland as "a topical political parody". As topical now as it was on publication in 1904, I fear. Subsidiarity? Convergence? Communitaire? "Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and what's more, I don't believe you do either!"

Copyright 1998 Times Newspapers Ltd.