The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton N. Cohen (Papermac, £12 in UK)

Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was an odd, even an eccentric man, but he had many likeable traits as well as some relatively off putting ones. We can hardly call him one of the great letter writers - he was too donnish, too prissy and too sedentary for that, too archetypically a mid Victorian, but his style as a correspondent is often lively and sharp. Most of Carroll's maturity was spent lecturing students at Oxford on mathematics, and his books and verses were mostly a side activity, even though it was they which made him famous. The illustrations include not only some of the "Alice" photographs, but an ineffably funny (intentionally or not) one of a small boy, Arthur Hatch, posing as Cupid, bow and all. The book is printed on rather poor paper, by the way, although the price is rather high.