Salvador Dali trips with Alice

Mashup is not a new thing. It’s been happening for millenia (except before “mashup” was a thing, they called it “collaboration”). And just as with the seemingly crazy-random-happenstanceness
that is the intarwebs, it has sometimes been horrifyingly WTF?, sometimes meh, and sometimes hashtag-awesome.

Yesterday I learned about the existence of a pre-Electron Deluge mashup that fits the latter category. Apparently, in 1969, my favortitest surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, created a set of illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s classic tale of Alice in Wonderland.

You know that moment where you realize the world is just a smidgen more marvelous than it was the moment before? Yeah, that happened for me. Times the absurd factor of a gajillion. Yes, the world is now a gajillion smidgens more marvelous for me. In Alice’s own words, “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

Of course, a gajillion-minus-one of those smidgens are mitigated by the fact that the book is long out of print. Oh sure, there are some originals available for a price, but they’re kind of hard to find. Well, okay, not hard, but when you find them, you realize you have little-to-no chance of ever owning one. Abebooks lists a few starting in the $10,000 range and quickly increasing in price from there. This is the part where I hate the free market. (Not really, but I’m feeling particularly hyperbolic this morning.)

Someone needs to reprint this sucker. And soon. Because I demand it.

If you’re itching to see the 12 heliogravures (vocab moment!!), Brain Pickings has an article with digital versions. They pretty darn amazing.

— “And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”