The British Library, an institution based in London, England, has been hosting an Alice in Wonderland exhibit. The curators organized this program to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s beloved novel.
Some of the items on display include manuscripts, reviews, and a variety of illustrated editions of the book. The closing date for has been scheduled on Apr. 17, 2016.
Here’s more information from the organization’s website: “Although the story has been adapted, appropriated, re-imagined and re-illustrated since its conception, we are still enchanted by Carroll’s original, much loved story, which continues to inspire new generations of writers and illustrators. Come and see Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript with hand-drawn illustrations, alongside stunning editions by Mervyn Peake, Ralph Steadman, Leonard Weisgard, Arthur Rackham, Salvador Dalí, and others.”
I have always been a reader, but eight years ago, strange circumstances conspired to make me totally book-dependent. I was stuck within four walls, desperate for distraction and a conduit to the world; but I had to live in total darkness, unable to see words on a page. So, from the small player in the [...]
Story and drawings by Mervyn Peake
Originally published in Country Life magazine 1939
Macmillian 1967 reprinted by Candlewick 2001
The Captain and his oddball crew settle in on an uncharted island where they encounter a creature the color of butter and then... do nothing?
The good Captain is a bruiser who has run through his share of crew. His ship, The Black Tiger, has lost many a men to
The Overlook Press has acquired the U.S. rights to publish Mervyn Peake’s final Gormenghast novel, tentatively titled Titus Awakes, in 2011, the centenary of Peake’s birth.
Peake’s celebrated Gormenghast Trilogy, telling of the adventures the Earl of Groan Titus in his gothic castle Gormenghast, is considered a classic of modern fantasy fiction. The three books Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone are currently available in trade paperback editions from Overlook.
Peake died in 1968, leaving a fourth novel in progress. His wife, the writer and artist Maeve Gilmore, began writing the book in 1970 but her completed manuscript was only recently discovered by their granddaughter in a South London attic. Maeve Gilmore died in 1983. Overlook Publisher Peter Mayer acquired the novel last week, adding to Overlook’s backlist of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast works. Overlook also published Malcolm Yorke’s acclaimed biography, Mervyn Peake.
Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in revolutionary China, where his parents were missionaries. He later drew on his exotic childhood and its often savage images in his adult creations. Throughout his life, he was a bohemian: as a student and then, later, in an artists' colony on the island of Sark, a place to which he often returned when city life became too stressful or expensive. Teaching in London, he fell in love with one of his students, Maeve Gilmore, and the two married despite her family's opposition. It turned out to be a close and lasting relationship, lived among a circle of friends that included Graham Greene, Augustus John, Dylan Thomas, and Walter de la Mare. Peake proved to be a miserable and incompetent soldier during World War II, and it was during this unhappy period that he began to write Titus Groan, the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy. In 1945 he was sent by a magazine to Germany, where he visited the Bergen Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation an experience that would profoundly affect his subsequent work.
Titus Awakes, by Meryvn Peake and Maeve Gilmore, will be published by The Overlook Press in July 2011.
When people consult a dictionary, they expect to find entries defining individual words, compounds made up of two or more words, and common multi-word phrases. But what about when a frequently occurring phrase or compound is used as a blueprint for generating new concoctions, with some parts kept constant and other parts swapped out? Last week I discussed some simple two-word “templates” that allow for creative choices in filling one slot, such as ___ chic, inner ___, and ___ rage. In such cases, lexicographers can make a note of a particularly productive usage in the entry for the word that is kept constant (like chic, inner, or rage). Things get a little more complicated when we consider longer phrases that follow a similar pattern of substitution. Traditional dictionary entries aren’t always well-equipped to describe this type of “phrase-hacking.” But one thing becomes quite obvious when looking at a large corpus of online texts (whether it’s the Oxford English Corpus or the rough-and-ready corpus of webpages indexed by Google or another search engine): writers are fiddling with phrasal templates all the time, revivifying expressions that may have become too formulaic or hackneyed. Of course, there’s always a lurking danger that the constant modification of a cliché may itself ultimately become a cliché!
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