Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland signed and doodled by Anthony Browne 1988

London: Julia MacRae Books, 1988 
 
Large 8vo., brick-red publisher’s boards, leterred vertically in gilt along backstrip, with publisher’s device to foot; in the original pictorial dust wrapper featuring illustrations by Browne; pale yellow endpapers; pp. [x], 117, [i]; featuring watercolour portrait of the author, featuring frontis and a further 13 stunning full-page illustrations, along with numerous head and tailpieces, initials, and other in-text illustrations; a fine copy, very slightly bumped to corners and spine ends, and a touch creased to the tips of jacket spine. 
 
First edition thus, signed and doodled by the illustrator to the title page in black biro: ‘To Phil’, with a drawing of a gorilla. Though of course no Gorilla’s feature in Alice, the reference is likely to the illustrator’s prize-winning work of the same name, which was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal, the Kurt Maschler Award, and was named by the New York Times as one of the year’s ‘Ten Best” picture books. Particularly charming here are Browne’s depictions of Old Father William standing on his head, the Caterpillar puffing on his pipe, and the melee of animals at the ‘Caucus-Race’.  
 
Award-winning illustrator Anthony Browne is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost living illustrators of Children’s books. In total, he has published almost 60 works, and in 2000 was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, an international award given to an illustrator for a combined body of work. In 2009 he was appointed the sixth Children's Laureate, a prestigious award celebrating outstanding achievement in the field of children’s literature. 
 
 As the dust wrapper here quite rightly states, the combination of Carroll’s Classic, paired with the illustrator’s fabulously evocative drawings are ‘a perfect marriage’. 
 
Rare thus.