Alice Box Set--Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass (Books of Wonder)

List Price: $33.90

Price: $495.00

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Lenny's description:
This boxed set contains both "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there" (hardcover editions), with the original illustrations by John Tenniel.

Amazon.com Review:
That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages)

Seller's description:
This deluxe slipcased set of the two facsimile editions of Lewis Carroll's masterpieces, the first with prints taken directly from the original woodblocks, is the perfect gift for every Alice fan. A Books of Wonder® Classic.

Product details:

Item number (ASIN): 0688120504
Author: Lewis Carroll
Creator: John Tenniel, Illustrator
Format: Box set
ISBN: 0688120504
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Package Dimensions: 197 x 616 x 901 (hundredths-inches)
Publication Date: September 23, 1993
Publisher: HarperCollins
Reading Level: Baby-Preschool
Binding: Hardcover

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Amazon.com customer reviews:

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- adventuring wonderland with alice
I loved this book, it was very easy to read. The book was also in very good condition and I will deffinatly be ordering from here agin.

Rating:

- No Illustrations in the Kindle Edition!
Don't buy the Kindle edition hoping to see the wonderful illustrations described in the product information. The Kindle edition is text only!

Rating:

- Certainly not the best Kindle version!
I love Alice in Wonderland. I've been reading it since I was a small child, hence I can honestly say that whoever retyped this for the Kindle did a shoddy (my peers would say "half-assed") job. Oh, it's readable, don't get me wrong. But if we'd bought this as a paperback, there would be an outcry, so why not shout out one for the eBook crowd? Shame on you! There are tons of typos. The quotation marks are in that cheap ASCII nearly-sideways type that makes you blink more than once until your eyes adjust. Italicized words jumped between actual italics to underscores before italicized words (e.g., I will prosecute _you_). John Tenniel's illustrations are non-existent (oh, the horror!!). But my biggest complaint, though, is the presentation of the poetry. In fully-justified, unpunctuated paragraphs. Are you serious, Kindle publishers?!? I got my first taste of things to come with "The Mouse's Tale" (Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house...), usually written in a fun, swirly format with decreasing font size. (You can see the original at [...]). I realize this would have been difficult to redo in the Kindle format, especially when the user is given the option to make the font bigger or smaller at will. But at least put it in stanza format! I tried to reproduce the result of the attempt, but Amazon's comment box reformats everything, so I'll try to demonstrate: Fury (huge gap) said (huge gap) to a mouse That he (huge gap) met (huge gap) in the (huge gap)house Let us both go to (huge gap) law, I will (huge gap) prosecute you. It's the worst example of full-justification allowable - the humongous gaps between words, no punctuation, three or four words per line...and so forth. Making the text bigger or smaller made it worse. The rest of the poetry is in plain old paragraph format, with punctuation thrown in haphazardly or missing altogether. In "Through the Looking Glass," consider the presentation of "The Walrus and The Carpenter." The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low; And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row. "The time has come," the Walrus said To talk of many things Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--Of cabbages--and kings--And why the sea is boiling hot--And whether pigs have wings. Readers might find this a little thing, but I'm sorry, this just bothered the hell out of me. I guess I should have expected it. I only paid 99 cents for this version, and you get what you pay for. And for God's sake, don't fall for the "free full versions" out there that were typed by "scholars" and available on the web for nothing - they're worse yet! So I give this 3 stars - a wonderful story brought low by lazy copy-editing. Honestly, publishers, if you're going to redo a classic for the Kindle: (1) Include the original artwork, (2) format it correctly so it resembles the original hard copy as much as possible, and (3) spell-check it, for crying out loud. Don't make Kindle owners wonder what other crap is in store that will make us sorry we bought the thing and just reach for our old paperbacks instead.

Rating:

- Average at best, as children's lit goes.
I am fully ready to admit that part of the problem may be that I did not read these books--either of them--as a child. That said, I am a huge sci-fi and fantasy fan and certainly don't have a lack of imagination, even at 27. Just a couple of years ago I re-read all of the Chronicles of Narnia, and enjoyed them just as much as--if not more than--I enjoyed them as a child. All of that said, yes, Carroll did a wonderful job portraying the messiness, strangeness, and scenery switches of a dream. But as a whole...his works barely rate a 3 on a one to five scale. In fact...I'd probably go with a 2.5 at best. Although some of his Victorian satire was certainly amusing, I feel as if these books were mostly nonsense and simply didn't contain the literary merit to render it a classic with the likes of, for example, Hans Christian Anderson, J.M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Beatrix Potter, Roald Dahl, the Grimm brothers, etc.

Rating:

- Kindle Edition Not As Described
The Kindle combined edition of Alice['s Adventures] in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass described here [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0011U42V6/ref=yml_dp ] has neither the Tenniel illustrations nor the annotations mentioned in the description. As you can get the books for your Kindle for free, it's not worth getting the combo - even for 99 cents - without these features. That seems rather the point of purchasing it. (It was for me, anyway.)