The Magic of Lewis Carroll

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 288pp., with many monochrome illustrations and diagrams. Moisture damage to the lower board edges, not extending to the text block; board top edges sunned; previous owner's ink inscription to the half title; minor offset to the endpapers and scattered spotting to the preliminaries; text block edges toned with some spotting; light bumping to the corners and spine extremities. Price-clipped dustwrapper is lightly rubbed with some minor edgewear and spotting to the verso; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Newspaper article 'The Curious Case of Lewis Carroll' by Morton N. Cohen laid in. There is a good story about Queen Victoria enjoying Alice's Adventures in Wonderland so much that she asked for a first edition of the author's next book. Two years later a beautifully wrapped package arrived, containing an inscribed copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry. Sadly, the story isn't true. To his adoring readers he was Lewis Carroll, the sweet-natured writer who wandered through life with a head full of stories. To his long-suffering colleagues in Oxford he was the Rev Charles Dodgson, the prickly mathematician who walked around with a poker-straight back and a head full of algebra. The two were like strangers who merely happened to inhabit the same skin. This book is its own definition of the sense of wonder first evident in the activities of the boy wizard and later providing the protective cloak essential as refuge from an adult life that came to encompass loneliness and left-handedness, a stutter and seemingly unconquerable shyness. In amassing for this purpose as comprehensive a collection of Carroll's original games and puzzles as possible including various magic tricks and gambits, which, while not originated by himself, would certainly have been familiar and therefore of some influence on him, manifestations of that same basic desire to fascinate and intrigue, whether his audience be young friend or high-table colleague. In 1885, Carroll's diary entry admits that 'never before have I had so many literary projects on hand at once'. He then proceeds 'for curiosity' to list fifteen separate projects from mathematical treatises with titles like Supplement to Euclid and Modern Rivals and Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers to a projected bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for young girls to 'A Collection of Games and Puzzles of my devising, with fairy pictures by Miss E G Thomson. This might also contain my "Memoria Technica" for dates, etc., my "cipher-writing", scheme for Letter-registration, etc, etc.' Editor John Fisher was himself a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and has previously published his own Magic Book.

Product Info

Publisher: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., London, 1973.

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

Seller Info

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