The culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, The Annotated Alice is a landmark event in the rich history of Lewis Carroll and cause to celebrate the remarkable career of Martin Gardner.
For over half a century, Martin Gardner has established himself as one of the world's leading authorities on Lewis Carroll. His Annotated Alice, first published in 1960, has over half a million copies in print around the world and is highly sought after by families and scholars alike—for it was Gardner who first decoded the wordplay and the many mathematical riddles that lie embedded in Carroll's two classic stories: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Readers who share Alice's taste in books will be more than satisfied with The Annotated Alice, a volume that includes not only pictures and conversations, but a thorough gloss on the text as well. There may be some, like G.K. Chesterton, who abhor the notion of putting Lewis Carroll's masterpiece under a microscope and analyzing it within an inch of its whimsical life. But as Martin Gardner points out in his introduction, so much of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is composed of private jokes and details of Victorian manners and mores that modern audiences are not likely to catch. Yes, Alice can be enjoyed on its own merits, but The Annotated Alice appeals to the nosy parker in all of us. Thus we learn, for example, that the source of the mouse's tale may have been Alfred Lord Tennyson who "once told Carroll that he had dreamed a lengthy poem about fairies, which began with very long lines, then the lines got shorter and shorter until the poem ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each." And that, contrary to popular belief, the Mad Hatter character was not a parody of then Prime Minister Gladstone, but rather was based on an Oxford furniture dealer named Theophilus Carter.
Gardner's annotations run the gamut from the factual and historical to the speculative and are, in their own way, quite as fascinating as the text they refer to. Occasionally, he even comments on himself, as when he quotes a fellow annotator of Alice, James Kincaid: "The historical context does not call for a gloss but the passage provides an opportunity to point out the ambivalence that may attend the central figure and her desire to grow up." And then follows with a charming riposte: "I thank Mr. Kincaid for supporting my own rambling." There's a lot of information in the margins (indeed, the page is pretty evenly divided between Carroll's text and Gardner's), but the ramblings turn out to be well worth the time. So hand over your old copy of Lewis Carroll's classic to the kids--this Alice in Wonderland is intended entirely for adults. --Alix Wilber
As all Carroll admirers know, his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), became an immediate success and has since been translated into more than eighty languages. The equally popular sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, was published in 1872.
The Alice books are but one example of his wide ranging authorship. The Hunting of the Snark, a classic nonsense epic (1876) and Euclid and His Modern Rivals, a rare example of humorous work concerning mathematics, still entice and intrigue today's students. Sylvie and Bruno, published toward the end of his life contains startling ideas including an 1889 description of weightlessness.
The humor, sparkling wit and genius of this Victorian Englishman have lasted for more than a century. His books are among the most quoted works in the English language, and his influence (with that of his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel) can be seen everywhere, from the world of advertising to that of atomic physics.
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.75. Seller Inventory # G0452003067I5N00
Book Description Soft cover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Wear and creases to the covers. Mild page toning. Otherwise a clean, unmarked copy. Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner with the original illustrations by John Tenniel. Seller Inventory # ABE-1511471465723
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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. John Tenniel (illustrator). Yellow and black titles on white color-illustrated trade paper covers, 345 pages plus 6 pages of bibliography. Full title: The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. Cover has some staining and the print and illustrations are small to fit into this soft cover edition. Seller Inventory # 018154
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Book Description paperback. Condition: Very Good. Illustrated by Tenniel,john Ilust (illustrator). Complete TEXT Edition. VERY GOOD CONDITION PAPERBACK, CLEAN, SOLID,BRIGHT; COLORFUL ALICE IN RED & YELLOW DRESS, being attacked by moving wall of playing cards.all on glossy white paper covers. Complete text and original illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in the only fully annotated edition. ; 352pg pages; Many interesting side lights & historical notes on the Famous Story. Seller Inventory # 136658
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