Wonderland Tales and Story-and-Picture Book. Published by Ideabooks 1973. Featuring artwork by Spanish illustrators Jesus, Alessandro and Adriano Blasco. According the blurb the brothers lived and worked together. You can see the slight differences in style through the panels, and I love the definite 70s aesthetic Alice has to her.
The book also features Gulliver’s Travels and The Golden Box as well as a couple of short stories, Shouting Stones and The Brave Young Shepherd
Published in 1974 by Purnell Books. Over thirty fairy tales – and not all the usual suspects either, ‘Toads and Diamonds’, anyone? When there was an existing Disney film, they used scenes from that, but when there wasn’t, they just bunged in characters they already had. So we have Grumpy in place of Rumpelstiltskin, and Alice (of Wonderland fame) standing in for the little match girl as well as several other characters. Somehow I can’t imagine Disney going for this approach today!
Snowstiltkin?
Pre Lumiere, Cogsworth et al
Alice in disguise
Isn’t that John from Peter Pan? And Figaro? And King Stefan from Sleeping Beauty?
Just occasionally I have to send a book or a set of printed proofs back to an editor. Until now I’d scrabbled around to find a postcard or note card to scribble on rather than a scrap of paper. So when Moo sent me an email to say that they were having a sale I thought I’d make some compliments slips. But then I noticed their flyers. You can print on both sides and have different images on one side too. So I used the square Alice in Wonderland word clouds I’d made for my Alice fixed-format ebook for the backs and my contact details on the fronts with space left blank to write on. They arrived yesterday and are great. They are on very heavy paper – practically card – with a matt finish that takes a biro no problem. Perfect!
Another Pepys card game. Apparently just called Alice because another company already had an Alice in Wonderland game.
This is the Disney version – again the whole story is told on the pack of cards.
Produced by Aventinum, Prague, for Treasure Press and published in 1992. I’d not seen this before. The rather lovely illustrations are by Dagmar Berková.
These are the three sisters in the treacle well – I don’t remember seeing them illustrated before.
This edition is illustrated by Eric Kincaid and published by Brimax Books as a WHSmith exclusive. It’s heavily illustrated – a mix of text and illustration and full-page and spreads.
Picked up in a charity shop sale for 30p. I also got Peter Pan – also illustrated by Eric Kincaid (I’ll post that later).
Alice has brown hair in this edition and looks more like Alice Liddell than the blonde Disney Alice.
An Alice in Wonderland card game. It looks 70s to me, but I’m not sure. I bought this of Etsy as ‘vintage’. If you put the cards in order they tell the story.
Cover
1976, a Whitman Book, published by Western Publishing Company, Inc and licensed from Disney.
I loved paper dolls when I was little. I dutifully cut out the doll on my Bunty comic (bought every week while my younger sister had Twinkle) and I had a collection of historical paper dolls too. I’ve been into historic costume since I was tiny and paper dolls were my first costume reference books. Regular readers of this blog will also know that I collect illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland. So when I came across this on Ebay I had to pick it up. This came from the US and I’m not sure that it was available in the UK. It is in perfect un-cut condition, so I have scanned it so that I can play about with printouts.
Here are the dolls on the back cover. They are press-out pieces on lightweight card. I love Alice’s all-in-one underwear.
The dolls
Some of Alice’s clothes. There is a mix of looks from the Disney animation and contemporary 1970s clothes. She even has a pink-striped catsuit a la the Cheshire Cat.
Clothes for Alice
There are also a selection of clothes for the Hatter and White Rabbit.
Clothes for the Hatter
Clothes for the White Rabbit
Another version of Alice
Covers
I picked these up in Hoddesdon a few weeks ago and just got around to having a look at them.
Here we have two 1965 Wonderful Worlds of Walt Disney books – Stories from Other Lands and Fantasyland. There are apparently four in the series. They were produced by Artist and Writers Press Inc and published by the House of Grolier.
Fantasyland contents
Other Lands contents
You’ll see from the contents pages that they are story collections. Some are adapted from Disney films – both animation and live action.
Snow White
A Swiss village
Some stories use film stills (again both animated and live action) and some are re-drawn using the animation style as in the Alice in Wonderland and Snow White stories (by Al Dempster and Campbell Grant respectively).
All in all they make lovely, varied and interesting storybooks. I didn’t have these when I was a child as far as I remember, but now I’m glad I’ve got them!
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland cover image from my version.
I love typefaces, typography and typesetting and generally playing about with how words look. I spent many years as a non-fiction editor, but I always liked to typeset the books I was working on when I could. When I was at Scholastic Children’s books I worked on highly intergrated illustrated non-fiction mainly, such as Horrible Science, Horrible Geography and Horrible Histories, and we had found it was easier if the editors did the layout, because they knew the text, and the designers did the initial spec, detailing and the covers, of course. It was my favourite part of the job, and as I got more senior and had to give some of it up it was something I really missed. Since I’ve been freelance my work so far has been mainly on the typesetting and digital conversion side of things – so hurrah!
A few weeks back I made a couple of sample ebooks using InDesign CC2014 to test out its fabby new fixed-format export, and while I was researching that, I came across a brilliant InDesign script called Wordalizer (thanks, InDesign Secrets!). It makes word clouds like this:
Or like this:
Now I love a word cloud! Wordalizer can use words on the clipboard, scan the open InDesign file, or you can type words in manually. I made the clouds in these images by copying a chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the clipboard. You can tweak the list it generates, delete and add words – it will also accept short phrases and give an indication of the weighting of each word. Then you can assign up to four fonts, choose the colour scheme, word orientation, cloud shape, etc. Once the cloud is generated it is completely customisable. Each word is a separate outline object and can be coloured, stroked, deleted, resized, moved, rotated to taste. Or you can go back into the script and tweak to your heart’s content there – you can even recolour without changing the cloud itself. You can also export as an eps, jpg or png and take it into Illustrator or Photoshop if you want. Hours of fun for a type fan like me!
I’ve wanted to make a version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for a while, but I’m certainly not an illustrator, so I’ve used the Alice word clouds I generated as illustrations for my version. I did very little to these clouds once they were generated as I wanted to see what Wordalizer was capable of. More tweaking to be done to the book, but I’m pretty happy with the way it’s going. I’ve converted it to fixed-format ePub, and it’s set up in a Blurb template so I might get it printed too.
Three Wishes Books 