ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

First edition thus, first printing. Signed by Jan Švankmajer. Publisher's original black cloth with titles in white to the upper board and spine and blind-stamped decorations to the upper board, in slipcase. Top edge ochre. Brown silk bookmark. Illustrated throughout with 76 colour and black-and-white illustrations by Salvador Dalí, Sir John Tenniel, Harry Furniss and Willy Pogany. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth fresh, the contents clean and bright throughout, without inscriptions or stamps. Contains frontispiece black-and-white photograph of Carroll shot in 1855 on page 6. Complete with very lighty rubbed original ochre and black cloth slipcase, structurally sound, with white titles on the upper board and spine and blind-stamped decorations to the upper board.

Issued in a limited edition of 300 copies, this example is numbered 18 and is signed by Jan Švankmajer in black ink on the limitation page alongside facsimiles of the signatures of Lewis Carroll and Salvador Dali. First published by Maecenas Press and Random House in 1969, Dali's surreal illustrations for 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' pair excellently with Carroll's fantasy world. This edition supplements Dalí's work with 40 illustrations by the original illustrator of the text, Sir John Tenniel, with an additional 18 illustrations by British illustrator Harry Furniss and five by Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany in an Art Deco style. This array of artistic contributions brilliantly demonstrates the extremely long-lived and varied impact of Carroll's work on art and culture. With an introduction written by Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, who himself wrote and directed a surreal film adaptation loosely based on the text, titled 'N co z Alenky / Alice' in 1988, starring Kristýna Kohoutová as the eponymous Alice. In an interview with Electric Sheep Magazine in 2011, Švankmajer declared that 'Lewis Carroll's Alice is one of the most important and amazing books produced by this civilisation' and went on to explain how he viewed Carroll's rendering of Wonderland as a 'dream', instead of a fairytale, and strove to retain this 'dreamlike' quality in his film adaptation (Sélavy, 2011). Švankmajer's film went on to win the feature film award at the Annecy International Film Festival in 1989.