Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll, Lewis. [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] Children's Books

Finely bound early printing of Carroll's beloved children's classic. Octavo, bound in full dark green crushed levant morocco by Kelliegram with gilt titles and elaborate gilt tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, all edges gilt, yellow silk endpapers. Mutli-colored pictorial morocco onlay to the front panel with the Mad Hatter at the center surrounded by four smaller depictions of Father William's Son, the Dodo, the Mock Turtle and the Duchess. Mutli-colored pictorial morocco onlay to the rear panel with the White Rabbit at the center surrounded by four smaller depictions of the Mouse, the Duck, the Eaglet, and the Cheshire Cat. With 42 black and white illustrations by John Tenniel including the tissue-guarded frontispiece. In near fine condition, inscription to the second free endpaper. An exceptional presentation. Alice's Adventures were "born on a golden afternoon" in July 1862, when the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) took the three small daughters of Dean Liddell of Christ Church on a boating trip up the Isis. Carroll delighted the three children by relating Alice's adventures, and eventually promised his favorite among the three, Alice Liddell, to write the story down for her. "The two Alice books completed the reinstatement of the imagination, so long disapproved of by the opponents of fairy stories, to its proper place. â Alice is, in a word, a book of that extremely rare kind which will belong to all the generations to come until the language becomes obsoleteâ " (Carpenter & Prichard, 102).