The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Gorgeous and Rare Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland by John Vernon Lord

“Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them,” Lewis Carroll once wrote in a letter to a friend, “so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means.”

Perhaps due to its timelessly whimsical nature, Alice in Wonderland — the umbrella title given to Lewis Carroll’s classic duo Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, inspired by a real-life little girl he once knew — has commanded a number of artful visual interpretations over the years, by some of history’s most celebrated artists — from John Tenniel’s original engravings to Leonard Weisgard’s gorgeous 1949 illustrations to Salvador Dalí’s little-known heliogravures to legendary cartoonist Ralph Steadman’s 1973 masterpiece to Yayoi Kusama’s unmistakable dotted fancy, and even some remarkable 3-D paper engineering. But among the most enchanting is the special ultra-limited edition Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (public library) illustrated by British artist John Vernon Lord — one of the most imaginative literary illustrators working today, who also gave us those spectacular recent illustrations for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The Alice volume was originally printed in an edition of only 420 signed and numbered copies, of which 98 came with a special set of prints.

Lord writes in the afterword to his glorious edition:

There is hardly anything new to be said about Lewis Carroll’s two ‘Alice’ books. So much has been written about them. Their contents have been probed by the scalpels of psychoanalysts, literary theorists, annotators, enthusiasts and the journalists. Perhaps I should include illustrators among this group, for it is the illustrator’s duty to get to grips with the text and thus make a visual commentary upon it.

Readers of the text and viewers of the illustrations also make a book their own. Each one of us interprets stories and pictures in our own way and each one of us is unique. . . . [But] I think we have to be careful not to look for too many possible meanings that we might think may be lurking within the text of Carroll’s Alice books. It is very tempting to do so and many writers have done just that, sometimes disturbingly, often without evidence, and sometimes in a most delightfully illuminating way.

And yet Lord’s own illustrations invite a wealth of meaning — the most “delightfully illuminating” kind possible. He argues that illustrators of classics like Carroll’s have the special duty of “confounding people’s expectations,” as readers are already well familiar with the stories and long “to be given a different slant to a familiar narrative.” I was fortunate enough to hunt down one of these rare editions — here’s a taste of Lord’s unparalleled genius:

If you’re able to track one down, do treat yourself to a copy of Lord’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There — it’s absolutely gorgeous. Complement it with other visual takes on Alice by Leonard Weisgard (1949), Salvador Dalí (1969), Ralph Steadman (1973), and Yayoi Kusama (2012).


Published April 8, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/08/john-vernon-lord-alice/

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