The (almost really) Complete Works of Lewis Carroll

Preface to the Seventy-Ninth Thousand

As Alice is about to appear on the Stage, and as the lines beginning “’Tis the Voice of the lobster” were found to be too fragmentary for dramatic purposes, four lines have been added to the first stanza, and six to the second, while the Oyster has been developed into a Panther.

Preface to the Eighty-Sixth Thousand

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle (see p. 97) can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz. “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!” This, however, is merely an after-thought: the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

For this eighty-sixth thousand, fresh electrotypes have been taken from the wood-blocks (which, never having been used for printing from, are in as good condition as when first cut in 1865), and the whole book has been set up afresh with new type. If the artistic qualities of this re-issue fall short, in any particular, of those possessed by the original issue, it will not be for want of painstaking on the part of author, publisher, or printer.

I take this opportunity of announcing that the Nursery “Alice,” hitherto priced at four shillings, net, is now to be had on the same terms as the ordinary shilling picture-books—although I feel sure that it is, in every quality (except the text itself, on which I am not qualified to pronounce), greatly superior to them. Four shillings was a perfectly reasonable price to charge, considering the very heavy initial outlay I had incurred: still, as the Public have practically said “We will not give more than a shilling for a picture-book, however artistically got-up”, I am content to reckon my outlay on the book as so much dead loss, and, rather than let the little ones, for whom it was written, go without it, I am selling it at a price which is, to me, much the same thing as giving it away.