lewis carroll and an elementary lesson on making a request

MANY GOOD STORIES are good, but not nec­es­sarily so, even in an el­e­men­tary way. For example:

“An old story has it that Queen Vic­toria was so en­chanted with Alice’s Ad­ven­tures In Won­der­land that she asked its au­thor to be sure to send her his next work.

So he did: it was An El­e­men­tary Trea­tise On De­ter­mi­nants—or, in some ver­sions, a bundle of ab­struse math­e­mat­ical pamphlets.

Like so many such charming sto­ries, it’s un­for­tu­nately com­pletely apoc­ryphal: Dodson specif­i­cally de­nied it in the ad­ver­tise­ment to his Sym­bolic Logic.”

—Tom Burnam, The Dic­tio­nary Of Mis­in­for­ma­tion (p. 4, 1975)

FEATURED IMAGE: The image at the top of this page is one of many, many fan­tas­tics drawing by Ralph Steadman from his takes on Alice In Won­der­land and Through The Looking Glass.