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
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.
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
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.
Alice cover
This time it’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with David Hall’s previously unpublished illustrations for Walt Disney Productions. First published by Methuen in 1986 and with an afterword by Brian Sibley. I picked this up in a YMCA charity shop for £1.50. Sadly it has slight water damage, but I’ve been able to separate all the pages and there is no staining.
In 1939 David Hall was commissioned to create concept artwork for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The project was shelved at that time (because of the War) and didn’t go into production until 1948. Apparently these illustrations didn’t see the light of day again until this book was published. Hall’s illustrations are fascinating – you can see the slight beginnings of the final Disney film in some places and echoes of early Mickey Mouse in some of the characters (see the mouse below). But many of the illustrations are quite menacing and nightmarish. The court scene is particularly gruesome with its guillotine and vertiginous POV. Brian Sibley’s afterword is very interesting and covers the history of Alice on film up to and including the final Disney version.
Drink me. The bottle is an animated character. In the final film the door knob was animated.
Lobster Quadrille
The court – complete with guillotine!
Caucus race and the mouse’s tail
Alice-themed books
Today I picked up two Alice in Wonderland -themed books.
The first is Toys from Alice in Wonderland by Margaret Hutchings with Doris Cook. It was published in 1979 by Mills & Boon. It contains a selection of toys based on the original illustrations. There are wonderful felt Red and White Queens in their chess-piece guise, a Rocking-Horse-Fly and a collection of ‘thimble toys’ using some of the animals from the pool of tears (Mouse, eaglet, Dodo, etc). Most of them are more models for display, rather than toys for playing with, but you can make an Alice with an extending neck made out of lolly sticks.
The second book is The Other Alice – The Story of Alice Liddell and Alice in Wonderland by Christina Björk and Inga-Karin Eriksson, translated from Swedish and published in (American) English by R&S Books in 1993. This is a fascinating illustrated book about Charles Dodgson, the Liddell family and the writing of the Alice books. The story is told mainly in narrative form, but with excursions into how to make a handkerchief rabbit (complete with diagrams), a spread on Dodgson’s photographs and what happened to everyone after Alice.
Today I picked up the 1974 Disneyland Annual in the Oxfam Bookshop in Welwyn Garden City.
Disneyland Annual 1974
Published in 1973 by IPC Magazines Ltd. Copyright © Walt Disney Productions.
It was originally 80p (About £7 in today’s money). As annuals are dated for the year to come, this would have been on sale exactly 40 years ago.
As well as short stories and comic strips based on characters from Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh and the Aristocats, etc, the whole Disney Alice story is reproduced in comic strip over sixteen pages.
Alice and the Caterpillar
From The Lost Kitten – featuring Thomas O’Malley and Duchess
And there are the usual activities, jokes and puzzles. Even activities using washing-up liquid bottles from ‘Mummy’s’ kitchen.
Draw Donald Duck
Tove’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland were first published in 1966 by Bonniers in Sweden – this edition in 2011 by Tate Publishing.
This is just after the caucus race. The animals are eating the comfits that Alice gave them as prizes. I love the one at the end spitting the sweet out.
The creatures from the pool of tears
The Hatter wears three hats. The Hare looks very chilled.
The Hatter, Hare and Dormouse
The trial scene. Notice the King looking sideways at the Queen.
The trial scene
In honour of Lewis Carroll’s upcoming birthday on the 27th January (which I share) here are some more 20th-century Alice illustrations.
First up: Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone – published in 1973 by World Distributors.
The caucus race
I love Alice’s striped stockings.
The tea party
A red-haired hatter.
The trial
A red squirrel juror.
And here is a thoroughly modern Alice: by Willy Pogány published by EP Dutton in 1929
The caucus race
This Alice has bobbed hair and short skirt.
the tea party
Hare looks like he’s wearing a tank top under his jacket.
the trial
This version is less dreamlike than others. She looks like she really has just kicked over a jury of animals.
Finally another version from 1929 by Charles Folkard. This really looks like inspiration for the Dancing Flatware scene in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to me.
Beautiful soup
Three Wishes Books 