“For more than half a century, this unusual yet organic cross-pollination of genius remained an almost mythic artifact, reserved for collectors and scholars,” until Princeton University Press saw fit to reprint it for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland‘s 150th anniversary (much as Taschen recently reissued Dalí’s bizarre cookbook Les Diners de Gala). “Dalí created twelve heliogravures - a frontispiece, which he signed in every copy from the edition, and one illustration for each chapter of the book,” writes Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova. It happened in 1969, when an editor at Random House commissioned the master surrealist to create illustrations for an exclusive edition of Carroll’s timeless story for the house’s book-of-the-month club. It thus only makes sense, despite their differences in nationality and sensibility as well as their barely overlapping life spans, that their artistic worlds - one with its grotesquely misshapen objects, obscure symbols, and hauntingly empty vistas, the other full of wordplay, whimsy, and mathematics - would one day collide. On canvas and paper, Salvador Dalí created apparently nonsensical realities that nevertheless operated according to logic all their own in writing, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, did the very same.
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