The “1865 Alice” — the legendary, rare copy of Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — leads June’s Books & Manuscripts auction as a stand-alone sale at 12pm on 16 June.

1865 would have been the year of publication for the fantastical classic if illustrator John Tenniel had approved the printing of his pictures. Due to Tenniel’s dissatisfaction, Carroll cancelled the edition of 2000 and requested the 50 advanced copies produced by Macmillan & Co. of London to be returned. The discovery of this first issue comes as a welcome surprise, shining as one of only 22 known copies, 16 of which sit in institutional libraries and only 10 still in their original red cloth. This privately-held, originally bound copy survives as one of the original treasures that galvanized both literature and the art of reading.

After touring London, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, the “1865 Alice” lands in New York to accompany other exceptional pieces for the June auction, from a presentation copy of Isaac Newton’s Opticks to a long-lost, 18-page letter to Jack Kerouac by the unprecedented-at-auction Neal Cassady. Akin to the powerful impact of the rare Alice, Cassady’s “Joan Anderson letter” indelibly marked the entire generation of Beat writers and directly inspired the stream of consciousness style of Kerouac’s On the Road.

Join the adventure into Wonderland on 16 June. Viewings in New York begin on 10 June.