CARROLL, Lewis.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Alice in Wonderland. Illustrated with Six Coloured Lithographs by Marie Laurencin. First Black Sun Press edition, number 214 of 300 copies on Rives Paper from a total edition of 790. This is one of 420 copies distributed in Europe.Alice in Wonderland was one of the Black Sun Press's finest efforts. Founded by the American expatriate couple Harry and Caresse Crosby, the press published sumptuous works by many modernist writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. Alice in Wonderland was published solely under Caresse's guidance: Harry died in a suicide pact with one of his many lovers the previous year. It was the first book illustrated by Marie Laurencin, one of the most notable female painters in inter-war France. An important member of the Parisian avant-garde, Laurencin flitted between the male-dominated Cubist movement and lesbian literary salons. She produced art that was "coy, queer, covert, and very pretty" (Lange), and her dreamy, pastel-hued imagining of Alice in Wonderland was "a considerable shock to those brought up on Tenniel" (Tebbel, p. 625).This copy has the name card of one Benjamin Crocker Clough loosely inserted, likely the professor of English and classics (1889-1975). Clough studied at Harvard and became the head of the classics department at Brown in 1929. In 1947 he published two works on folk tales: The American Imagination at Work and Tall Tales and Folk Tales.

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