A vast collection of Alice in Wonderland memorabilia heads to auction next month.
The 3,000 items, sold across 300 lots, include books, posters and toys - all related to the girl who went down the rabbit hole. They will sell at a dedicated auction at Mallams in the UK on February 8.
Lewis Carroll's logic puzzles are among the lead lots
Among the highlights is a first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as well as two typically Carroll-esque logic puzzles the author handmade for his publisher Macmillan in the 1880s.
The items come from book dealer Thomas Schuster, who died in 2013.
Schuster spent 25 years amassing the collection, which was exhibited, in part, at the Tate Modern in Liverpool in 2012.
Mallams explains the auction offers “the first opportunity to view the collection in its entirety - the myriad books, porcelain, artwork, posters, toys, dolls and ephemera that have surrounded the cult of Alice since the earliest years. They range from the rare and academically important to the downright bizarre.”
Up for grabs: a first edition of the book that made Carroll famous
The Oxford auction is a homecoming for Alice. Carroll was a don at the city's university and first told Alice Liddell the story of her namesake during a boating trip along Oxford's stretch of the Thames.
Alice items can achieve large sums at auction. Carroll's personal copy of the "withdrawn" first edition, recalled because of the poor quality of the pictures, sold for $1.5m in 1998.
A Cheshire cat puppet from the 1949 French film production made $11,000 in 2013.
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