The Annotated Snark (with signed card)

1962, first edition, with a handwritten card from Martin Gardner to Morton N Cohen

Author

Publisher

Printing Details

First US edition. Hardback in dustwrapper. 25.5 × 15.5cm, 111pp.

This copy belonged to Lewis Carroll scholar Morton Cohen, and loosely inserted is a handwritten postcard from Martin Gardner to Morton Cohen which refers to Morton Cohen's immense work on the Letters of Lewis Carroll.

Full title: The Annotated Snark, The Full Text of Lewis Carroll's Great Nonsense Epic The Hunting of the Snark and the Original Illustrations, with an introduction and notes by the editor of The Annotated Alice

Martin Gardner here "presents Lewis Carroll's great nonsense epic, The Hunting of the Snark, with a peppering of comments—literary, historical, biographical, semantic, intuitive, mathematical, psychological, philosophical and fanciful." Through the book, Martin Gardner relates some of the extraordinary theories where people claim to have cracked the Snark, and also offers his own startling twentieth-century interpretation. The book is illustrated with Henry Holiday's original drawings, including the original "suppressed" drawing of the Boojum. The appendices include F C S Schiller's tongue in cheek Commentary on the Snark, and the bibliography includes excerpts from translations into foreign languages.

Condition

The book is in good condition with some minor corner creasing to the end of the book and some rubbing and bumping to the boards' edges. The dustwrapper has edgewear and chipping to nearly all edges and a small oblong cut from the spine so is in fair/poor condition only. It is now within a protective sleeve, but a rare example of two Lewis Carroll heavyweights coming together.