In November 1864, Alice Liddell received a book bound in morocco leather with the inscription ‘A Christmas gift to a dear child, in memory of a summer’s day.’ It commemorated an outing in July 1862, when a small party that included Alice, aged 10, and her sisters Edith and Lorina rowed down the Isis river at Oxford as their friend Charles Dodgson spun a fantasmagoric tale of rabbit holes, shape shifting, and verbal whimsy. The book was titled
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and Dodgson had worked on it for two years, fashioning 37 illustrations which he interspersed in the handwritten manuscript. Later the story was edited, expanded, and renamed, with the familiar illustration by John Tenniel, but this original version remained in Alice's hands for 60 years. It passed to private collectors until it was donated to the British Library, where it remains one of their most prized possessions. You can flip through the entire book
here.
The Folio Society, whose offerings always brings an onset of book lust, has a splendid facsimile edition (
left) that will set you back a mere $180. If your house lacks a copy of the
Alice in Wonderland version of the story, we have one for $3.98.
This description of their new edition of
The Sound and the Fury describes how the Folio Society pulled off an amazing literary and typographic coup to have the book printed as Faulkner envisioned:
The Sound and The Fury is acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century literature. It takes the modernist narrative devices of stream-of-consciousness, time-shifts and multiple changes of viewpoint to an unprecedented level of sophistication. Faulkner was well aware that readers would find it difficult, and employed italic and roman type to convey its ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’, but when his agent attempted to standardise and simplify the system this prompted an angry objection from Faulkner. He quickly jotted down eight time-levels in Benjy’s section, ‘just a few I recall’, and wished that it could be ‘printed the way it ought to be with different color types’, but he concluded pessimistically, ‘I don’t reckon … it’ll ever be printed that way’.
The Folio Society determined that it could be printed that way, and drew on the expertise of two noted Faulkner scholars to work on fulfilling Faulkner’s idea. Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk undertook the painstaking task of identifying each different time-level to be coloured, while keeping the original italic/roman shifts. We can never know if this is exactly what Faulkner would have envisaged, but the result justifies his belief that coloured inks would allow readers to follow the strands of the novel more easily, without compromising the ‘thought-transference’ for which he argued so passionately.
Would having this edition encourage you to read the book?
