Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Two Volumes. First People’s Editions, 1887

CARROLL, Lewis. [Tenniel, John, illustrator.] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. With illustrations by John Tenniel. London: Macmillan and Co., 1887.

First People’s Editions. Two volumes. Small octavo (8vo). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: [ix], 179, [4] pp., including Christmas greeting and publisher’s advertisements. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: [xi], 208, [3] pp. Publisher’s original green pictorial cloth, decorated in black and red, with illustrated front covers after Tenniel. Frontispieces with tissue guards; forty-two illustrations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and fifty illustrations in Through the Looking-Glass by John Tenniel.

A matched two-volume set of the first People’s Editions of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, issued by Macmillan in 1887 in the publisher’s illustrated green cloth. Through the Looking-Glass includes the “Dramatis Personae” and chess problem preliminaries, with the red and white pieces arranged before commencement of game.

Contents clean and unmarked, with light uniform toning throughout and scattered foxing. Both volumes have frontispieces with tissue guards. Bindings remain firm, each with spine lean, wear and fraying beginning at head and tail of spine, bumped corners, rubbing to extremities, and rubbing, marks, and soiling to front and rear boards. Through the Looking-Glass with rear free endpaper detached but present. A good, complete, and presentable set of the first People’s Editions.