I'm no expert on literary relics, but I have to suspect that the market for Lewis Carroll artifacts is one of the largest in the world. Geoffrey Chaucer is older, but there is nothing from his hand, and the manuscripts are almost all in major libraries. William Shakespeare is more popular, but all that, too, is bought up. Newer authors have left, if anything, too much stuff behind. But Carroll has fanatical followers, and he's recent enough to have left many letters, photographs, and editions, but long enough ago to have a slight air of the antique about him.

Thus it was that, when Alice Liddell Hargreaves sold the manuscript he gave her of Alice's Adventures Underground, it brought a higher sum than any literary manuscript ever auctioned to that time.

The point of which is, Carroll artifacts are mostly in private collections, don't show up very often, and when they do, the prices tend to be high. So, for those of us trying to glean information about Carroll that is not in the biographies (all of which suffer from the problem that we have very little real insight into the actual thought processes of Charles Dodgson), we generally can't get access to the relics. All we can do is look at the sale catalogs of the larger collections.

Some of these can be extraordinarily revealing. Thee June 2001 Sotheby's auction of the memorabilia of Alice Liddell's family revealed things that no one ever knew before, such as the astounding number of editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that Alice assembled -- even during the period when she largely refused to talk to Dodgson. I have no idea what psychological trauma produced that situation, but without that Sotheby's catalog, no one except Alice's few surviving family members would have had any clue.

Other catalogs are less useful. The Schiller collection, the subject of this Christie's New York catalog, is very valuable but not very personal; it has several first editions but not a lot of special information. Similarly a 2005 Christie's/South Kensington auction of the Nicolas Falletta collection. This particular catalog might make you jealous of Justin G. Schiller and all he managed to accumulate, but it won't teach you much about either Dodgson or Alice Liddell. That mattered to me. Does it matter to you? I suppose it depends on what you want to know about Dodgson. ( )