The Annotated Hunting of the Snark: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll's Great Nonsense Epic The Hunting of the Snark

The definitive guide to one of the most baffling epics of nineteenth-century literature―a companion to The Annotated Alice.

"It's a Snark!"…for whatever else can it be?" Published on April Fools' Day in 1876, Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark remains one of the most amusing and bizarre works of modern verse. Carroll, who completed this classic poem eleven years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, invites readers along on a fictitious hunt to determine who―or what―the Snark actually is. More than 130 years later, the indomitable Martin Gardner returns to the Snark with a trove of new annotations and illustrations, uncovering some of the most confounding literary, linguistic, and mathematical references embedded in any of Lewis Carroll's many works. Included in this gorgeous, two-color volume is an introduction by Adam Gopnik, as well as Henry Holiday's distinctive, original illustrations, a substantial bibliography, and a suppressed drawing of the infamous Boojum. With a host of other Snark resources, this is the most ambitious work on Lewis Carroll's masterpiece in many decades.

Lewis Carroll is a pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was born on January 27, 1832, and died on January 14, 1898. His most famous works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There; and The Hunting of the Snark.

Martin Gardner (1914-2010) is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on Lewis Carroll and his work. The author of more than a hundred books, he wrote the "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American for twenty-five years and has been hailed by Douglas Hofstadter as "one of the great intellects produced in this country in this century."

English artist Henry Holiday (1839-1927) worked in the Pre-Raphaelite school and created many works of art, including over 300 commissioned stained-glass windows and the illustrations for Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has written for the magazine since 1986. He has three National Magazine awards for essays and for criticism. The author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon, he lives in New York City.