The Jabberwocky - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0744592933 ISBN 13: 9780744592931

Publisher: Walker Books Ltd

Synopsis

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe. So begins one of the most celebrated and best-loved nonsense poems in the English language, "Jabberwocky", which first appeared in 1872 in Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Using a technique of digital collage, Joel Stewart reveals a natural affinity with Carroll's vision, capturing with great wit and imagination the extraordinary world of the poem and its memorable creatures, such as the Jubjub bird, the frumious Bandersnatch and the manxome Jabberwock. "Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

About this title

About the Author:

Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898, taught mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He is the author of two of the classic stories of children's literature: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (a Kate Greenaway Medal-winning edition of which is published by Walker Books) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). These books contain many of his most popular poems, including "Jabberwocky", "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and "How Does the Little Crocodile?" Joel Stewart grew up in Sheffield and was awarded a First Class BA Hons degree in Illustration at Falmouth College of Arts. Since graduating he has illustrated several titles, including the widely acclaimed Walker picture book Adventures of a Nose, written by his girlfriend, Viviane Schwarz. Joel lives in Falmouth, Cornwall with Viviane and several goldfish.

From School Library Journal:

PreSchool-Grade 4-Carroll's classic nonsense poem gets a fresh visual interpretation here. In a series of spreads, a child mounts his quest for the fearsome Jabberwock in an "other" world in keeping with the delicious unknown conjured up on first hearing, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves-." After a glimpse of the hero, the real world shows up in the form of facing oval frames-one containing the poem, the other a Victorian father-and-son read-aloud scene. But from then on, with a few lines of the poem per page, children enter a spare landscape of rattan-printed trees, postage-stamp-sized art, and full-color ink-and-watercolor creatures whose simple, almost cartoonish look echoes Edward Lear's comic sketches. The uncluttered composition of these pages leaves plenty of room for Carroll's words to do their work. Printed in uppercase, in a faintly rune-ish serif typeface, they gyre and gimble, whiffle and burble cleanly across the page. Stewart has not paid precise attention to Humpty Dumpty's explication of the poem as it originally appears in Through the Looking-Glass, but he has captured that wordmeister's affinity for conglomeration and arbitrary meaning, creating his own odd creatures to inhabit Carroll's perfect peculiarities. The slightly removed tone is maintained by a climactic twist: when the vorpal blade snicker-snacks "through and through," the beast's innards are revealed to be mechanical-clockwork springs and gears. Other illustrated editions worth considering-Graeme Base's (Abrams, 1989) signature packed pages or Jane Breskin Zalben's (Warne, 1977; o.p.) delicately detailed watercolors-hew more closely to Humpty Dumpty's definitions, but this new version is a good choice for a younger audience, nicely conveying the lighthearted mysteriousness of the poem.
Nancy Palmer, The Little School, Bellevue, WA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Walker Books Ltd
• ISBN 10: 0744592933
• ISBN 13: 9780744592931
• Binding: Hardcover