'Legendary' first edition of Alice in Wonderland set for auction at $2-3m

"On 2 August [1865], Carroll would write in his diary: “Finally decided on the reprint of Alice, and that the first 2,000 shall be sold as waste paper.” In an introduction to a later edition of Alice in Wonderland, Carroll scholar Morton N Cohen writes that the author “would probably have been content to leave the first edition stand and, at most, would have wanted the later impressions printed more carefully. For him it was simply a case of making concessions to his uncompromising illustrator.”


Cohen records that Carroll “suffered most by the need to reprint”, with it costing him £600 to do the book a second time. Carroll wrote in his diary that “if a second 2,000 could be sold it would cost £300, and bring in £500, thus squaring accounts: any other further sale would be a gain. But that I can hardly hope for.”

The book became one of the most beloved stories in children’s literature, and Cohen writes that “so choice” has the “inferior” first edition now become, that “collectors would trade whole segments of their libraries for a single copy of the ‘first’ Alice; bibliographers dream of uncovering an unrecorded copy; and literary chroniclers are at a loss to explain how, even in the heyday of Victorian publishing, such extravagant decisions could be made over a single children’s book as were made over this one.”

Christie’s, which will auction the text on 16 June in New York, says that surviving copies of the “legendary” 1865 edition are “excessively rare”. Sixteen of the known copies are in institutional libraries, and six in private hands."