A girl follows a rabbit in a waistcoat down a hole in a bank because it takes a watch out of its pocket, and she never once asks herself whether she should. That is the whole engine of the book. Everything under the ground is polite and completely insane, and Alice keeps trying to be reasonable at it, and it keeps not working, and she keeps going anyway.
A door too small to get through and a bottle that says drink me. A pool of her own tears with a mouse swimming in it. A caucus race that everyone wins. A caterpillar on a mushroom who asks who she is and will not accept any of her answers. A baby that turns into a pig on the way out the door. A cat that fades until only the grin is left. A tea party stopped dead at six o'clock because the Hatter quarrelled with Time. A croquet ground where the mallets are flamingoes and the Queen wants everybody's head. A trial with no evidence and a verdict decided before the first witness opens his mouth.
Nothing in it is a lesson. Carroll made it up in a boat on a July afternoon for a ten year old who asked him for a story, and he wrote it down because she asked him to do that too. The jokes are logic jokes, the verse is parody, and the nonsense is built with the straightest face in English literature, which is exactly why it has never stopped being read.
This edition sets all twelve chapters entire, with the prefatory poem and all forty two of John Tenniel's engravings placed where the first edition prints them. The pictures were cut under Carroll's eye and they are half of what the book is, so they sit in the text at the moment they draw rather than collected in a gathering at the back. They are set here from a printing taken off Tenniel's own electrotypes.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 118 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
