Octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spine gilt, triple rules to covers gilt, black coated endpapers, all edges gilt. Housed in a custom red quarter morocco and black cloth solander box. Frontispiece with tissue-guard, 49 illustrations by John Tenniel. Front hinge starting, some faint foxing to outer leaves, otherwise internally fresh.
An exceptional copy. Charles Dodgson’s annotated copy of the third edition, and one of only four copies known in the original cloth. In a situation reminiscent of the recalled 1865 Alice, this is the suppressed impression of Through the Looking-Glass. Dodgson summarises the printing problems that led to its suppression on the half-title here: “Received Nov. 21/93. Paper too white, 26 pictures over-printed, 8 of them very bad”, and has annotated the text with 34 comments on the production faults (“very much over-printed, very bad indeed … very bad folding”). Dodgson made it a “point of supreme importance, that all books, sold for me, shall be the best attainable for the price”, and such was his dismay with the printing quality that it almost provoked the termination of his contract with his long-time publishers. Dodgson wrote to Frederick Macmillan the same day he annotated this copy, complaining that “the book is worthless … much as I should regret the having to sever a connection that has now lasted nearly 30 years, I shall feel myself absolutely compelled to do so, unless I can have some assurance that better care shall be taken, in future, to ensure that my books shall be of the best artistic quality attainable for the money” (Letters, p. 995).
Only 60 copies of this impression had gone out when Dodgson asked Macmillan to destroy the remainder, but Dodgson escalated the dispute, halting the working-off of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, and demanding that “no more Wonderlands are to be printed, from the present electrotypes, till I give permission” (24 November 1893). Through the Looking-Glass remained out of print until 1897, although the whole of the impression was not in fact destroyed: Dodgson changed his mind and had it rebound for distribution to charitable institutions, as had been done with the suppressed first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In an unpublished census, Selwyn Goodacre traced four copies in the original cloth, though one of these is since lost.
