Customer Reviews

Gramercy Classics Lewis Carroll: The Complete Illustrated Works

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Of course, it is very nice to have pretty much every Carroll work you could want in one volume, however there is one major drawback here. While the blue leather binding and gold gilt text and page edges are quite nice, I found the actual pages to be a very low quality thin paper. Also, the margins are very small, cramming alot of text on each page, while the paper and print quality actually take away a minor of the illustration detail. Overall, not a bad collection, yet I think "The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll" thru B&N is superior even without the bells and whistles.

MK

'The Complete, Fully Illustrated Works, Deluxe Edition' of lewis Carroll's works may actually be more than you really want. While three of Carroll's works, the two Alice fantasy novels and the long poem, 'The Hunting of the Snark' are major classics of English literature, Carroll wrote an equal or greater amount of pretty dull stuff, primarily the two 'Sylvia and Bruno' novels, which I have never been able to finish.

On the plus side, the fact that this edition is 'fully illustrated', meaning that it has both John Tenniel's illustrations for the Alice stories AND Henry Holiday's illustrations for 'Snark'. Even so, you may just be better off buying just the annotated versions of the Alice stories and the annotated Snark.

Forewarned is forearmed!

When I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking and What Alice Saw There, I fell in love with the imagination of Lewis Carroll who could create such a world. I loved the characters and the plain craziness. As a kid, that imaginary world where nothing APPEARED to make sense was just fun. I had so much fun acting out the different parts and pretending that I was at a tea-party with the Mad-Hatter. It's a classic for kids because it lets them use their imagination without the constraints of reality. It's far healthier than sitting in front of a computer or TV. But as a book for adults, it's still a classic. Many people, understandably, just see illogical nonsense and get frustrated with that. I don't claim to understand all of it, but remember, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. Do you realize that Through the Looking Glass is a chess game? Anyway, it's a nice change from trashy Danielle Steele novels or similar pieces of work that are like TV shows on paper. They don't allow people to think or to discuss or use their imagination. They, perhaps more than Lewis Carroll, make reading a frustrating and nonsensical activity.

when i got this in the mail, i was amazed at how beautiful it looked... leather bound, gold edged pages, stunning illustrations. i couldn't wait to dive in to alice's world. highly recommended for any alice in wonderland fan.

The "Alice" books are amazing...I'm sure most of you know that by now. This edition is unique in that it includes the rest of Carroll's works, as well as "Alice Underground", the original version of "Alice's Adventures in WOnderland." This section is even written in Carroll's own hand with copies of his original illustrations. The book is also of really nice quality (its leather-bound I think). I originally bought this book because I have always wanted to read "Through the Looking Glass." I was gonna purchase a normal $5 paperback version but then I saw this one. I decided to be bold and dish out the extra $15...believe me it was worth it...Heck, I would have paid $50 for it easily... If you buy this book you won't regret it...

Alice has been my favourite book all my life (both volumes). It made totally different sense to me when I was 6 than it does now that I am grown up, so it has seemed like many different books to meme throughout my life!

It's great to see Carroll's other works. Some of the poems are just as good as the ones in ALice. One of my favorite poems is "Hiawatha's Photographing", which is written in the style of Longfellow. The introduction, in prose, is actually written in the same eetre. Except that you don't notice that, because the punctuation is like prose, not poetry. It starts: "In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy..." It's nice to have the illustrations because Carroll was very careful about the illustrations and you can see just how he pictured his works. This is a wonderful book to give as a gift either to someone else...... or yourself

This is the only one i've found recently that has "Phantasmagoria" and the handwritten "Alice's adventures underground".

This book is really for the person who is really into Carroll and will read through all of his works. It's a thick volume and is useful to me, but this is because i am writing a book so i'm probably not the best judge since i have to read all of the collected works.

Another astute reviewer said, "Do you really want all of the collected works?" But for the price, i say, you may as well buy the book, then you can see what you like and skip around. Who is to say or dictate that you must read cover to cover. You may find there are writings of Caroll thatyou didn't know about before - such as his poetry and so on.

I own the book and find it very handy for reference but also as a genral book of interst. It's also a good gift book for adults and children alike and is a handsome volume and is not muddled up with annotations like many of Carroll's books are these days, which is fine, but more for the scholar. This is the perfect book to dip into and again, a good gift book and as a former publisher i can tell you that the price-point is excellent for what you get here. A bargain.

If you like Carroll's Alice books, you may as well buy this since it will cost you more or as much to buy both of them. This way, you get both Alice books and then some. There is an argumnt right there.


sadi ranson-polizzotti

Wonderful.....wonderful. Lewis Carroll is a genius to behold. Which such books as Alice and Looking Glass (which I like better than Alice) Lewis Carroll has made us have wonderful entertainment for ages. Sylvie and Bruno is in it.... including The Tangled Tale, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Alices Adventures Under-ground, Rhyme? and Reason? The Hunting of the Snark, Three Sunsets, and, of course, the two Alice books.

A toast to Lewis Carroll!

Outside of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, I enjoy no author in any language more than I do Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll. His bizarrely creative mind stands alone in world literature, and his maze-like stories (which can be interpreted by the reader in a variety of interesting ways) are both immensely enjoyable and intellecutally stimulating. These tales, from the immortal "Alice" books (translated and quoted from more often than any English language text besides Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to the early "Phantasmagoria," are largely accessible, succinct, and simple, yet driven by a striking undercurrent of delicious parody and delightful nonsense. In the age of Marx and Freud, men who attempted to explain everything, Carroll, more than anyone else, stood up for true art; his work (especially the twisted "Hunting of the Snark") defy conventional academic interpretation and application to the real world, thus embodying Nietzsche's sentiment that "we have art so that we don't go insane." His highly creative vocabulary puts his work on the cutting-edge, over 50 years before anyone had heard of his most visible successors, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov (who translated Carroll into Russian), et al. Perhaps it a testament to Carroll's greatness that his works, more than almost any others of the Victorian age, endure so visibly during the modern day; his patented blend of simplicity, wordplay, and, above all, imagination, may never again be seen, and thus ought to be treasured very highly indeed.