This week my object is Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The book is particularly important to me for personal reasons, but the book itself has a history all of its own. Lewis Carroll was born Charles Dodgson and was actually not a writer at all. Dodgson was a professor who taught elementary mathematics at Oxford. He had a passion for photography at an early age and a particular affinity for young girls. Most outstanding of which was his fondness for the real Alice, Alice Liddell. As the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Alice Liddell had her own tutors and was well known in the area around Cheshire. Dodgson took a liking to her over the dean’s other two daughters, which is why all of his stories focus on Alice. These stories began as short tales that he told Alice and her two older sisters. While many readers have speculated whether or not the author experimented with hallucinogenic drugs to come up with his fantastical stories, the reality behind the tales of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is that they each began as Dodgson’s creative fairy tales. Carroll used to tell stories to the three girls, but also liked Alice the best.

The cover of the book is calendared, meaning that it has a plastic feel in your hands. The pages that actually contain the text are made of newspaper style paper and are held together with a perfect binding. Ironically, this technique is not perfect at all. In fact, this style simply means that the pages are sewn together and then glued into the binding with a temporary adhesive. Ultimately, the perfect binding technique can only hold it together for so long. These physical properties of this specific copy were originally pretty standard to each issue, but of course that changed once it came into my possession. As you can see, this copy is missing quite a bit from its front cover and first few pages. These small bits were actually chewed off by a bunny that was just as hungry if not hungrier than Eric Carle’s caterpillar. My bunny, Stormy, chewed off the corner of the cover and the few beginning pages, luckily, he never made it to any of the actual story.

Besides these physical properties, it also has a library barcode on the spine that indicates that it once belonged to a local library. In fact, it belonged to my high school library, but I managed to steal it and kept it with me through all these years. This was not the first book that I stole, but it was one of the more meaningful. I fell in love with the story the first time that I read it and decided that I needed to keep this book. Fortunately, I never ended up in any trouble for stealing, but this origin added something extra special to the book that I knew made it something that no one else can ever own. This story of how it came to my possession along with the story of its desecration by rabbit teeth makes it a unique object that could only be found on my bookshelf.