The Annotated Alice
was first published in 1960 by Clarkson Potter. It went through many printings here and in England, in hardcover and paperback, and was translated into Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Hebrew. I was unable to persuade Crown, which took over Potter before Crown was in turn taken over by Random House, to let me do a major revision of the book by adding a raft of new notes that had accumulated in my files. I finally decided to put them in a sequel titled More Annotated Alice.
Random House published it in 1990, thirty years after the previous book.
To distinguish the sequel from The Annotated Alice
I substituted Peter Newell’s 80 full-page illustrations for Tenniel’s art. Michael Patrick Hearn contributed a fine essay on Newell. I also was able to add to More Annotated Alice
the long-lost “Wasp in a Wig” episode that Carroll left out of his second Alice
book after Tenniel strongly urged him to remove it, but one still had to open two separate Alice
books simultaneously, which seemed a bit impractical.
In 1998 I was surprised and delighted when my editor at Norton, Robert Weil, suggested that the notes from both Alice
books be combined in a single “definitive” edition. They are all here, some of them expanded, and many new notes have been added. Tenniel’s pictures in The Annotated Alice
were poorly
reproduced, bristling with broken type and fuzzy lines. For this volume they have been faithfully copied in their original clarity.
The “Wasp in a Wig” episode is included in this book, along with the introduction and notes I wrote for its first publication by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America in a 1977 limited edition. I had the great pleasure of tracking down the New York City collector who had bought the original galleys at a London auction, and persuaded him to let me reprint them in a small book.
In addition to thanking Weil for making this edition possible, I also thank Justin Schiller, the nation’s top seller and collector of rare books for children, for permission to include reproductions of Tenniel’s preliminary sketches from Schiller’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
privately printed in 1990. Thanks, too, to David Schaefer for providing a checklist of film productions of Alice,
based on his great collection of such films.
