Imholtz talk to mark anniversary of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

9:33 a.m., Oct. 22, 2015--A talk by August A. Imholtz Jr. marking the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will be held at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 1, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library on the University of Delaware campus in Newark.

The title of the University of Delaware Library presentation is “His Master’s Voice and Alice: Eldridge Johnson’s Adventure with Lewis Carroll’s Alice Manuscript.”

Events Stories

June 5: Blue Hen 5K

University of Delaware graduates planning to attend Alumni Weekend are encouraged to register for the annual Blue Hen 5K walk and run, which will be held Sunday morning, June 5.

June 6-9: Food and culture series

The 20th annual June Lecture Series at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UD in Wilmington will be held June 6-9. Titled 'June a la Carte,' this year's program focuses on great political documents, feminism, world politics and a Newark cuisine sampler.

• June 6-9: Food and culture series
• Through June 30: 'Saving White Clay Creek'
• July 22: WWE Heatwave Tour
• Through Sept. 16: Women of color in academia

Those who plan to attend are asked to RSVP via email at libraryrsvp@winsor.lib.udel.edu or call 302-831-2231.

Born in Delaware in 1867 and a long-time resident of the First State, Johnson rose from humble origin as a machine shop apprentice to perfect and patent, with Emile Berliner, the early gramophone, the Victor Talking Machine. 

Selling 1,696,000 phonograph records in 1902, Johnson became one of the wealthiest Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. 

This talk is about not only Johnson himself but also about his love of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books leading to his purchase in 1928 of the manuscript of Carroll’s first draft of his famous Wonderland book, originally called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

The talk will also address his meeting with the real Alice – not the 10-year-old girl of the book, but the 80-year-old Alice Hargreaves (nêe Liddell), when she visited the U.S. in 1932 – and the interesting fate of the Under Ground manuscript while in Johnson’s possession and what happened to it after his death in 1945.

Imholtz was the government documents vice president of Readex, a digital publishing company. A former president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, he is also a past president of the Baltimore Bibliophiles, a member of the American Library Association’s Rare and Endangered Government Publications Committee, and a member of the Lewis Carroll Societies of Great Britain, Canada and Japan. 

He has written or edited several books and published more than 100 articles on Greek and Latin philology, Lewis Carroll, and other subjects. He has lectured at Cambridge University, the Smithsonian Institution, Princeton University, the Foreign Language Library in Moscow, and other institutions. 

This talk is associated with “‘We are all Mad’: The 150th Anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” an exhibition that will be on view Nov. 20-Dec. 18 in the Guenschel Case, located in the University of Delaware Morris Library’s Information Room. 

The display includes a copy of the facsimile of the Alice manuscript Johnson had printed in Vienna in 1936.