 So, as you all know, last year a very rare manuscript appeared that had never been seen before. It was Lewis Carroll's original handwritten version of Through the Looking Glass with his own hand-drawn illustrations, and somehow I managed to get exclusive rights to publish the facsimile of this, and Happy April Fool's Day. That is not exactly how it happened. It was about two years ago that Mark Richards and I were having a glass of wine at an event, a Lewis Carroll event, and I don't know how the conversation got there, but at some point Mark said to me, wouldn't it be great if Lewis Carroll's hitherto unknown version, handwritten version of Through the Looking Glass, just showed up some day, had been discovered in a dusty trunk somewhere? And I said, yeah, that would be wonderful, because like many of you, I'm a big fan of Alice's Adventures Underground. I love seeing Lewis Carroll's original handwritten intention of what he wanted, that what eventually became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but in his own handwriting and with his own charming but somewhat clumsy illustrations, I've had my little dover reprint of Alice's Adventures Underground since I was a teenager, and I've just always loved it. So the fantasy of there being a Through the Looking Glass version of that, as soon as Mark mentioned it to me, I thought, yes, if something like that showed up, of course there would be a facsimile for us all to buy, and then the next thing that came out of my mouth was so strange, I said I would even buy a facsimile of such a thing if it was fake. And we laughed, and then I couldn't get it out of my mind. I thought, yeah, if somebody created a fake version of Through the Looking Glass manuscript and it was published in facsimile, I would buy it. And then I thought, well, probably so would hundreds of other people, maybe we should create one. So I ran this idea past Mark Burstein for some advice, and he said, well, I don't know if you could sell that idea to a publisher, but you could self-publish it. It's very easy to do nowadays, and the books could be printed on demand. And I said, all right, well, I need some help. I'm going to need an illustrator. He recommended Jonathan. I said I'm going to need a book designer, and he recommended Andrew. So here are the three of us, the dream team that created Looking Glass House. And I don't know if the three of us have ever been in a room together, ever, ever. This is the first time. We conducted our partnership completely by telephone and email and created this book. And if you don't have one, I brought several copies with me today that I can sell you. They're $20. I'll spare you the postage that you would have to pay on Amazon. If you don't have one and don't want to get one today, you can get them on amazon.com. And there's part of me that doesn't want to tell you anything about what's inside this book, if you haven't seen it. Obviously, as these gentlemen talk, you're going to find out a little about this book. But part of its charm is that we wanted, we know that Lewis Carroll had a very playful imagination. And in creating Alice's Adventures Underground, it's kind of a playful book in that there's kind of a little surprise on every page as you go through it. And we wanted our book to feel as handmade as possible. We wanted Lewis Carroll's spirit to really inhabit this book so that you really felt the playful spirit and quality of Lewis Carroll's creativity coming through in what we were creating in his style. So I'm not going to give any of those away. These gentlemen might. But I don't want you guys to give too much away because there's just so many good things in this book. I'm just going to hold up to give you an impression of what it looks like inside. There is a tone to the pages that makes it look like a facsimile of an antique book. The chapter headings and the illustrations, we've gone as far as we could to make this look as much like Lewis Carroll's own work as possible. One of the heroes of this book that is not on the stage today is whoever came up with Lewis Carroll font. Because I don't think we would have taken on this project if we would have had to create Lewis Carroll's penmanship by hand. That was that was just going to be too much work. But anyone can download Lewis Carroll font. So thank you whoever did that so that we could with a computer render the text into this kind of format. Gentlemen, why don't I hand it off to you guys? Let me say one more thing. I knew there was more thing I wanted to say print on demand. We wanted our book to look like it was a facsimile of something that had been created by hand. Print on demand is a system where these books are printed by a computer operated machine, a printing machine with no human involvement. So we had to create what looked like a handmade book that would be made without any kind of human interaction. So basically as our book designer, Andrew had to create a PDF that used all the characteristics of something that was supposedly made by hand. And this PDF would be dropped mechanically into a machine and printed in a way that was convincing enough to make it look like this was actually made by hand. I think we succeeded and it was no easy task. So now I'm going to pass this on to you guys. You first. We'll talk to our illustrator first. So here's Jonathan, who took on the unenviable task of imitating Lewis Carroll's illustration style. Well, and I keep telling Daniel that you need to give him a little bit because it's like drugs and it like makes him want more and then they come and then you charge him a lot of money for it. Go ahead. Okay. So it feels weird because I'm talking about some pictures that we're pretending are by Lewis Carroll, but they're really not. And I did them. So Daniel came to me and he said, give him a taste of it. He said, can you draw like Lewis Carroll? And I said, of course I can draw like Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll couldn't draw very well, so it'll be easy. So as soon as I committed to it, fear set in. And really, this is a good excuse to talk about Lewis Carroll's drawing style in a way because I had to really immerse myself in it. And I haven't seen a whole lot on it actually. People say, yeah, Lewis Carroll drew his own pictures, but I don't know that I've seen a lot of analysis of his picture. So maybe I can get into that because I had to try to imitate that. That immersion, I think, was what was most rewarding to me because what I found is he was an amateurish artist. We know that sort of crude. He had talent. But what made it hard is there is. And they came from the same mind that wrote Alice and the same mind that took those photos and the same mind that we all love. So I really had to immerse myself in that. And how do you draw a spirit? Because his pictures are pure. They're him. And so I could, yeah, I try to imitate an amateurish artist, but that wouldn't necessarily be Lewis Carroll. So that was the hard part. How do you imitate a spirit? I don't know. I know when I've done things related to Lewis Carroll, like the hunting of the snark or when the society publicly guided Abraja for the first time. And I'm proud to say I was the first illustrator of work by Lewis Carroll. And then the theater company I'm with in Santa Fe did liquidate Abraja as a puppet production. My goal was always, I don't want to interpret Lewis Carroll. I want it to feel like him. That's the goal. It has to feel like him. And if it doesn't, it's a failure. So this was almost the most pure version of trying to feel like him as trying to draw like him. So I went through and I looked at all his pictures that I could find, and not just Alice Underground, but also his family magazines. And there's a good book by Morton Cohen and Edward Wakeling collecting his Lewis Carroll's letters to his illustrators. It has a bunch of his sketches that he would send to his illustrators. And I just went through all those and just tried to pack it in so much that it would leak out of my fingers in the end without too much thought. You know, I hope I succeeded. There are a few times I think I fooled myself even when I was drawing these. I would get my pictures mixed up with some of his. And I would think, OK, in this picture, I have to try to capture the spirit or the feel that Lewis Carroll had in his picture of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I thought, no, wait, I did that one. So I could see it coming out. The strange thing is sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't. Like I'd be sitting down and on some days I couldn't do it. And I would start freaking out saying, I've lost it. I've lost the feel and things would come out with good perspective or good anatomy. And I'd go, no, that's wrong. And then the next day or a couple of days I'd let it go and it would flow again. That was the tricky thing of trying to imitate Lewis Carroll, I think, is going against so many of my own instincts that I've tried to develop over the years of good drawing. And it was a real battle because actually I find it distressingly easy to draw badly. But over the years I've, as you try to do, you try to detect that as you're drawing it and then fix it and say, oh, that's not good. The leg's too short or whatever. This time I would be drawing and I would be saying, the perspective's flat. It's bland. It's boring. The perspective's wrong. Alice looks like her shoulder's dislocated. And I'd go, but that makes it right. Another thing is this did take some intellectual analysis to as well as just the immersion of just looking at the way he tended to draw eyes or noses and analyzing certain things like, for example, when I do shading lines, they tend to go this way. And a lot of artists tend to make their slants of a shading go this way. So I would keep catching myself trying to do my shading lines go other direction. In consistency, that was another one. Studying this, Lewis Carroll went against so many rules of good illustration such as making your characters look the same from one picture to the next. If you look at the Red Queen, she looks completely different in each of his four pictures. And there was sort of a freedom in he didn't care, apparently. So I would purposely put in inconsistencies. And I think it would come up in our discussions like, well, the white knight has a cape in this picture but not in the other one. Yeah, that came, the white knight's cape came from looking at pre-Raphaelite paintings and how they drew knights. So I was trying to imagine what were some of the source pictures Lewis Carroll might use to copy. I remember we talked about the chess pieces sometimes have feet and sometimes have a chess piece base and it's inconsistent from drawing to drawing. Yeah, and the Red Queen in one picture doesn't have any arms. And then in the next one, she does. And I think somebody said, well, that's kind of weird and I say, yeah, it is. Another thing is that was really interesting to study Lewis Carroll's inking style because he didn't do it well. And again, it would just grate on me internally saying, that's not how you use ink to shade. You're supposed to do cross-hatching and things. And he tended, I've never seen anyone comment on this and I've never thought about it until I was trying to recreate it. He tended to use a pen like trying to do shading with a pencil and it doesn't work. Like trying to do less pressure on it and just sort of shading like this. It would work with a pencil, but with a pen it just gets muddy. So I was trying to reproduce muddy, bad inking. But again, keeping the charm of it, that was the tricky part. Can you tell us, were you dipping a pen in ink or was it a fountain pen? No, actually, it's a brown ink pen, some like this. It reproduces a pen in ink look really well, except without all the dangers of big blots and things. So in a way it's kind of strange, and I guess again it's a sign of success of a sort, that when I show these and I didn't prepare anything to show you because it was just too much work. It's just another reason to buy the book everybody. I've got the originals here. If anyone wants to come look in my folder here, you can have a look at what I'm talking about. But partly, if you show those, I'm a bit embarrassed by them because I go, they're not very good. You can be very proud of your work. In the sense of, do I think I replicated Lewis Carroll? Yeah, and I'm proud of that. Maybe 75 to 80% because who can really, it's a bit presumptuous to say, these are what Lewis Carroll would have drawn. We don't know that. He would have done something completely different. But did it capture his spirit? And I think, yeah, to some degree, I'm proud of that. Good, good. I think you should be. We all like to dissect everything in terms of percentage of success. But your intention to capture the spirit is exactly what makes me smile as I turn every page in this book. And for those of us who were on the artistic team that created it, for us to like it as much as we all do, shows a lot about its success. Can I just throw in one quick more thing before we get to Andrew? One of my favorite parts, and it sort of typified the whole project, is I liked that Dan had based his editing down of the text on what we know Lewis Carroll had really thought early on. Like some of his notes that we have. And for example, one of the early chapters is called the glass curtain, right? Right. And that's what he called it. So it gave us a chance, let's do something different. Instead of like the mirror turning into a mist, which is what it is in the final book. Let's try something different, but it's based on his idea. So let's do it parting like a curtain. So that's what I drew is Alice like spreading the mirror aside like that. So it's true to him, and frankly I think it's a better image. I think he should have kept it in his final book. And it reflects Lewis Carroll's love of the stage. So now we have, instead of Alice climbing up, the curtain is parting like a curtain on a stage and she's going up on the stage. That feels true to Lewis Carroll. And frankly, it almost feels more true to Lewis Carroll than what he actually ended up doing. So I think we improved on Lewis Carroll in that one. He spent a lot of time talking about what did Lewis Carroll think? What would he have done? We have that great letter from John Tenniel, the illustrator, who said, I can't draw a wasp and a wig. Please cut the wasp and the wig out. So of course the wasp and the wig is in this rough draft version of the story. He said when the train jumps, Alice would naturally grab hold of the goat's beard instead of the old lady's hair. So of course in this version she grabs the old lady's hair. So we took the story back a big step. It's much shorter, it feels like a rough draft, a lot of famous poetry and longer conversations are missing from this book because this aims to be a simpler version of the story, one that might have been told during a picnic as opposed to something that Lewis Carroll sat down at his desk to write. So it's a simpler, faster version of the story. In speaking of Tenniel, it was hard to forget him and put him out of my mind and go back to actually Lewis Carroll's words. For example, nowhere in the text, even the final one, does he say the white knight is old? So I didn't have to draw him old, it was more interesting. So I thought what might Lewis Carroll have drawn? He was the sympathetic character, he's the only sympathetic character really, other than Alice. He's nice, maybe he's a young noble knight. Maybe this is what maybe Lewis Carroll would base him on a Byrne Jones painting of a noble knight. So I tried to draw Lewis Carroll's version of a Byrne Jones noble knight. The chess pieces, and actually I think the final book even refers to them as having round heads, which is what chess pieces do have. Tenniel drew them as like little people with costumes on. So I said no, let's go back and draw them as chess pieces. He drew Lewis Carroll and his original, drew the cards as cards, not little guys wearing like sandwich board outfits. So I tried to make them look more like chess pieces. Andrew, tell us about the challenges of designing this book. I absolutely am going to show you something on the screen in a moment, but first I would like to say, as Dan said, we were trying to make this look handmade. So all of these letters, and the chapter openers, were in fact drawn by hand. Well they weren't exactly drawn by hand. I took a tight face, which Dan approved, and printed them all out, traced over them, scanned them in Photoshop, put them into Photoshop, squeezed them, hand colored them. So this is actually the scan of the drawing that I did, of the tracing that I did with an old fashioned square nib pen. And I did these multiple times because I am hard to please. So I did them again and again and again, and then Dan said, oh we should put color around them. So when you get the book you'll see there's a little bit of purple because we know Carol like purple ink. So I made them red and then I had to put these purple outlines on them and it wasn't easy. And the same thing was true with the cover. And as you can see, I picked up Jonathan's illustrations of Alice going through the mirror in the front and the back. And Dan and I at the same time, I think our emails were almost simultaneous about, let's reverse this on the back. Wouldn't that be cool? So it was great minds thinking alike. My granddaughter helped me pick the William Morris paper. I have a number of them. Again, the wonders of technology, these papers exist on my computer. And I said, well, Rachel, what do you like? This one or this one or this one? And she said, well, I like these three. And so I showed those to me to Dan and this is the one he picked. So I'm going to hold on to this one. Sure. Also, I'd like to point out that when you look at the cover, sometimes it's easy to assume that an artistic team said, this is what we want. What you see on the cover is actually the 25th or 30th incarnation of should it be this, the letters should be narrower. Oh, that we don't like that. Here's 50 different William Morris prints. So as a creative team, we went through many, many decision-making processes all through email to arrive at what we'd like to best. Once again, we're having some technical difficulties here. How do we close? We need to close this and open my PDF. This is a good opportunity to take a question. Anybody have one? Yes. I just use pencil and ink pen. Oh, sorry. Okay. Oh, all I could go by is the reference books I had and just look like he did pencil sketches or inked over them with a pen and ink that you dip. He would dip. I've never seen him use anything other, I think, than pencil and ink. I've seen some of his original drawings, like in the original Alice Manus grip that's in the British Library. I've actually seen that. Yeah. Yeah, it's about that big. And is there, when you look at those illustrations of the originals, are they all completely inked? Is there any pencil visible on those? I was looking through all the facsimiles to see if there's any pencil where he missed the racing, but I think he erased pretty good. So it's all pen and ink? Yeah, that's all you can see now. And it's sort of a brownish ink, I think. Maybe that's age, so I used brown pens too. Because I know artists use brushes as well with ink, but I don't think that was his technique. It all looks like the nib of a pen. I never saw that. Yeah, maybe some thicker pen tips and thinner ones, but it all looked like a real pen. There we go. So this is original. This is Lewis Carroll. Yeah. Yes. This is Alice's, a spread from Alice's Adventures Underground, the facsimile version that I happened to have, which explains that silly little extra number up there. I was hoping, oh, shoot, I was looking forward to this pointer, but it's not working. Oh, well. But as we said, we had to consider, what did Carroll do? And throughout, we was thinking, what would CD do in this situation? Well, the other thing is, as a book designer, I know that there are many, many decisions to go into everything you see in every book you pick up. Most people are unaware of them and should be. If the book is saying, hey, look at my design, it's poorly designed. That's the next. Yeah, I wanted this to work. So you can see, this is Carroll's page. These are the decisions that he made. He had a basic grid. He had a certain amount of space from the top of the page to where the page number was, a certain amount of space from where the page number was to where he started writing, and he had margins. These are all taken for granted, of course, but they are conscious decisions. The other interesting thing about Carroll, which we'll come up again later, was that he was very good at almost justifying his pages. He didn't quite, I mean, nobody can writing by hand, but his right-hand margins are pretty clear. So I took his basic grid and I copied it. And so that's where he had his page numbers. Those are his margins. And I measured exactly how much space he had between his lines. And so this was my basic grid. And this is a chunk of manuscript. This is where we start. So basically I'm showing you pages progress. Now I also, I wondered when he was producing this, did he rewrite? Did he cross out? Did he throw pages away where he made a mistake? Did he spill something? All we have is the final book, which is very interesting, but it would be also interesting to know how many stages did he go through. We know it took him a long time to produce this. So it's very likely that he had to rewrite pages again and again and again and again. Well, I did too. I didn't have to rewrite them, but I did have to rework them. Dan made a few editorial changes. Those weren't the problem. You'll see what the problems were. So here's a chunk of manuscript. And I took this chunk of manuscript and I floated into the grid and I made it into the Louis-Carol font that Dan mentioned. Now you can see that caused problems such as the word Alice, a terrible widow or orphan up there on the right-hand page. Really bad book-making. You'd never do that in real book. And because it's flush left, or I could write, you can see there's way too much space on the right side. On the right page, it's not too bad. On the left page, there are really big gaps Carol would not have written that way, or dodged them. We did call them CD as we were working on this. So then I thought, well, what if we justify it, really justify it, and then I could go back and maybe cheat a little? Well, you can't cheat in InDesign when you're trying to justify it. Again, that's not what CD would have done. So we'll get to how I handled to make it look like what CD would have done. This is... the next step was putting in Jonathan's sketch. In this case, it looks a little peculiar because I did what's called... I found the outlines. I don't know why I did that. It didn't really matter. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I do know why I did that. I thought at this point, we were going to have a white background, so I was going to have to have white behind the drawings, and I wanted to get some idea of what they were going to be like. You can also see on the lower right where that arrow is, I had to make a separate text box to make it fit next to the illustration. Sometimes I could make it run around. Sometimes I couldn't. Also notice, it's just fine pretty well there. I don't remember why I put that arrow on the upper right anymore. Sorry. But do note, Carol did a lot, or Dodson did a lot of underscores. That was a problem. Here they are. He did underscores. He did dashes. He did double hyphens. Every time he hyphenated a word, he didn't hyphenate it just at the end of the line where he wrote it. He also put a hyphen on the next line. I had to go in and put them all in because that wasn't going to happen automatically. Yeah, let me just point out if you obviously are all familiar with the text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass, there are a lot of italicized words. He loved to emphasize words. Now, in the printed form, they're italicized. In our handwritten version, they're underlined. But if you look at, they all thought in chorus. I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means. Well, the font comes with an underline, but it's mechanical. You can see it's just a thin straight line. It doesn't look hand drawn at all. So basically, you had to insert. We'll get to that. Same thing is true of the dashes. Because he loved to draw dashes, there's only one dash in the font, and if you use the same one all the time, it's clear it's a font. It's not handwritten. And by the way, I meant to say thank you, Dan, for giving me this new career as a forger. You're welcome. So that was something else I was aware of. I thought, well, we have to make it look like these are hand drawn, and I did eventually do that. However, before I could do that, I had to fiddle with the line lengths to make them look like what Carol would have done. And this is how I had to do it. There is a place in design, if you see on the lower left, where you can actually select a character or a line or a paragraph and make it wider, make each character wider or narrower. And I went through almost every line in the book doing that. So this one, to make it work, was 90%. This one was 103%. And I just had to do it by instinct. You know, just going through and saying, well, this doesn't look right, or this is causing a widow, or it's not working out with the illustration. So I just went through it many, many times, changing it again and again and again. And when the text changed, I had to go through it again and fix it. So that took a while. The other thing is that, as Jonathan pointed out, that Dodson often put his type very close to his illustrations. Now, my guess is he would draw the illustration first on his piece of paper and then write around it. Which, of course, I wasn't doing. I put the illustration in afterward. But that's just a theory of my own. So once I had this set, I went back to Underground and I scanned and selected all the underscores and dashes I could find, and I made them into individual pieces of art. And because we had the tint, I had to add the tint behind each one. So I put these larger ones at the bottom so it's clearer what the tint is. And then I went back. Now I have to say something else. Every time we made a small change in the text or in the way the illustration was set on a page, the computer, as computers do, wants to reset everything that follows it. So if Andrew placed an underline on a page, it was there like an illustration and stayed put, even if the text shifted around it. It made our task, and especially, well, certainly... My task. This was my task. Not his, mine. But my job as proofreader was that after I had approved something, I always had to go back every time there was a new version generated and re-proof everything because the slides change had a ripple effect. Yes. The dashes weren't so bad. The dashes, it was possible to insert like characters within the lines so they would move with everything else. But the underscores were quite difficult. But we did this and we got to the final page. It finished its progress. So there's a question. How did I... Yeah, I didn't want to make a lot of changes once both of these guys started their efforts. So I made my editorial pass first. I cut the story about in half. Alice's Adventures Underground is about half the length of the finished version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. So that was my goal as well, to make it about half as long. Yes. Well, I... I don't know what you would call it. The program I use is InDesign. Yeah, that's the program I use for the night letter also. And I did learn things by doing this that I'm now able to apply to the night letter. So it's... And as I work... I've worked on the night letter over the years. I hope you've seen it improve visually. It's going to continue to do that. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I do think that using a mechanical system to create something to look handmade, we probably forged new territory. Yes. Forged... And forged is the apt word here. Yeah. Anyway, that is... The progress of the page is complete. And it is page 26. Let's see. So our time is up. Did you have any more images to show? No, this is it. Except there's the page. Yeah. It actually worked. So... So we're out of time, but is there a quick question that we can address? Yes, sir. I live in Santa Fe, so I avoid that word, because there are too many people who do that. No, did I ever feel like his spirit coming in and touching me? No. Do I feel like I have a good sense of the man from all the years of reading him? Yeah, I think so. Here's a microphone so everybody can hear you. How well are you getting on with the Sylvia and Bruno manuscript? Ah, yes. Well, that was... His original was just two pages long, and then he expanded. Yeah. No, I'm a very good editor. I will tackle Sylvia and Bruno and give it to you to illustrate. I will keep you informed of our progress. Yes. There's a lot of interest in Leonardo da Vinci's left-handedness causing left-hatching. So you didn't elaborate on that point. Lewis Carrot was Dodson left-handed, and is that a clue to his personality? I don't know if I've ever... Is there a consensus here about his right or left-handedness? Yeah, but I don't know. I'm right-handed, and I do it a way that most right-handers don't do it. I think this is more the common way, and for some reason I do it this way, and he did it the more common way, but I don't know which hand he used to do that. Okay. Yeah. Time. Wouldn't they have forced him in school to use the right hand, the left hand being the hand of the devil? So... Well, they did that to my grandpa in the early 1900s. It's an interesting question. Will he use the left hand? Let's talk about that at lunch. Yeah. Anything else? Yes, sir. One question for you. Are you at all scared that if Lewis Carroll's spirit looks down on what you've done and realizes you haven't given all the profits to a children's charity? If there are profits. If there are profits, which at this point I doubt, but I hereby swear to donate them to a children's charity. There you go, Reverend. I brought several copies of the book today. If anybody would like to buy one, I'll have them available for sale. They're $20. You don't have to pay for postage today, which you would on Amazon.com. Today is your only day to get all three of our signatures in it if that turns you on. Thanks very much. Thank you.