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Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History, by ZoeJaques and Eugene Giddens; pp. xiv + 248. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013, £65.00, $149.95.
In this volume, part of Ashgate's "Studies in Publishing History: Manuscript, Print, Digital," Zoe Jaques and Eugene Giddens "consider the publishing history of Carroll's Alice in a broad sense that accords with ideas of the 'sociology of the text'" (a term coined by D. F. McKenzie in his 1986 Bibliography and Sociology of Texts), which allows them to define "text" in the widest sense of the term (1). Accordingly, their examination ranges from entries in Lewis Carroll's diary about the first telling of the tale in 1862 to twentiethand twenty-first-century "revisions" and "transformations" of the Alice books "beyond the page," a category that includes film, television, and stage versions, as well as music, manga, fashion, and computer games (201).Jaques and Giddens also take up the matter of the three so-called first editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the first UK printing of 1865, which Carroll and illustrator John Tenniel found to be of poor quality and asked to have reprinted; the reprinted edition, which was the first edition published in the UK, also in 1865; and the original UK printing of poor quality, published in the U.S. in 1866. They also consider The Nursery 'Alice'(1889), Carroll's adaptation of Wonderland for, as he put it, "Children aged from Nought to Five"; Henry Savile Clark's 1886 stage version of Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1871); and the merchandizing of Alice in the form of biscuit tins and Carroll's own Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case, as well as revised editions, American editions, editions in translation, and editions published after the UK copyright to Alice expired in 1907 (63). The volume also includes a chapter on adaptions for children, illustrated versions, and "new retellings" of the Alice stories: that is, "the various ways in which the Alice books have been revised or...