Guest blogger, Charlie Lovett, Curator of  the exhibition, 'Alice Live,'  at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts, October 2, 2015 - January 16, 2016.

Like Alice Liddell herself, I first encountered the story of Alice in Wonderland not on the page, but in the sound of an Englishman’s voice. On rainy afternoons during childhood, I used to listen to the LP recording of Cyril Ritchard reading the Alice books. I fell in love first with that voice and then with the story. To this day I don’t know why those records were up in our attic. At the same time, I was falling in love with the theatre. Our school did a class play every year and after debuting as the Gingerbread Man in the first grade I played roles from Rumplestiltskin to the wise badger of The Wind in the Willows to Tom Sawyer (a role my father said I had been rehearsing for all my life).

That father was a book collector. When I first started to travel without my parents as a teenager, I would haunt used bookshops looking for copies of Robinson Crusoe, his particular passion. I found I loved those scouting trips, and decided to follow in my father’s footsteps. But what should I collect? He collected a single title, and so would I. And why not Alice? Surely there must be dozens of different editions. I little guessed what a rabbit hole I was falling down. I now have thousands of items—illustrated editions by a century and a half of artists, foreign translations, and a huge collection of other books and pamphlets by Lewis Carroll.

In addition to Alice, the other constant passion in my life has been the theatre. I was a theatre major in college and worked as a children’s playwright for over a decade. So, one of my favorite parts of my collection is the theatrical memorabilia. Collecting materials related to the theatre is a great way to expand one’s book collection beyond books, for, while I do have scripts and other bound items, much of the material is more ephemeral—playbills, posters, flyleaf advertisements, photographs, and so on.

In 1997, I lived with my family in England for six months, and decided to expand my collection to encompass not just Lewis Carroll but also the world he inhabited. A big part of this was trying to document the plays he had seen (he went to hundreds). I sat on the floors of dusty bookshops and at ephemera fairs and compiled a collection of playbills of productions he had attended and photographs of actors he had seen. Along the way I learned a lot about the Victorian theatre.

In one of those shops, the shopkeeper told me every time I came in for a visit that he had some sort of Alice poster at home. Every time we went into London I would stop by the shop, and he had always forgotten to bring it in. It wasn’t until a year later that he finally presented me with a worn paper bag containing some folded poster panels. He told me the poster was incomplete and in poor condition but that I could have it for £75. When I sent what I thought were tattered remains to a poster restoration company, I found out the bookseller had misled me. The poster, which you will see in the exhibition, was complete and in good condition. I later identified the poster as dating from 1933–34, and I believe it is a unique survivor. When I built a new office a few years ago, there was a tall wall at one end of the room, so we designed the bookcases to surround this beauty.

Almost every item in my collection has a story behind it, which appeals to me as a novelist. One of those stories I told in print in 1989, when I published my first book, Alice on Stage. It told the story of how Lewis Carroll tried to get his Alice books put onto the professional stage and how a man named Henry Savile Clarke eventually rose to the challenge. Much of the material that documents that story is here in the exhibit, and I have a special fondness for these items, not just because they date from the time of Carroll himself, but because they also tell the story of my own beginnings as a professional writer.

About four years ago, I received a call asking if I would curate an exhibition about Alice in performance at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. As I started to assemble materials for this exhibition, I pored through files here at Lincoln Center and was thrilled to find materials that, in spite of a lifetime of collecting, I had never seen. The collections here are truly rich, especially in documenting New York productions. As you wander through the exhibit, you’ll see many items (perhaps even most of the items), which have never before been on public display.

I hope you will enjoy Alice Live! as much as I have enjoyed selecting and describing the materials in the exhibit. And if this exhibit leads you either back to the pages of Alice or to the theatre, well then you’ll be in one of my favorite places.