Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Book
This book brings together the photographs taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, the author notorious for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. He was also a prolific photographer whose Victorian portraits of children, in particular, are highly regarded. He also photographed portraits of adults, still lifes and landscapes, and his subjects included the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais.
Carroll was a true English eccentric who loved wordplay, puns, anagrams, riddles, and all sorts of mathematical games and puzzles. The jacket accordingly features an extract of Through the Looking Glass from which the author’s name emerges, typeset in a Victorian faux-three-dimensional font lifted from an old type specimen. It is printed on Fedrigoni’s Savile Row Tweed paper as a nod to Carroll’s desire for social ascension. Underneath the jacket, the cover shows another playful quotation. The corners of the book block were been trimmed to echo Victorian photo albums. Indeed, Carroll would make his own albums and ask the sitters to sign their names under the photograph. The jacket and end leaf colours are based on the Farrow & Ball paint range used for decorating houses in 19th-century England.
Publisher: Phaidon
Author: Anne Higonnet
2008
