The Hunting Of The Snark Paperback – February 2, 2009

I found it best to get the most look up on line images of the characters in the book and also to read along from on line audio recording so the rhythm and rhyme could be appreciated, as librevox.

This review is of the Kindle edition of The Hunting of the Snark with illustrations by Mahendra Singh.I have always loved Lewis Carroll's nonsense, both the prose and the poetry and The Hunting of the Snark is one of the best long nonsense poems there is.This edition is excellently illustrated by Mahendra Singh with pen and ink drawings of the important parts of the story. There is a drawing for most verses that interprets the ideas of the verse, or verses, that it accompanies.The only problem with this excellent edition is with the lack of page breaks in the main text. This results in some of the smaller pictures appearing on different pages to their associated texts, it would be better if they were on the same page. Apart from this one minor imperfection this is an excellent edition.

If you're tired of reading authors who aren't good writers and take themselves too seriously...read Lewis Carroll. The complete inverse, Carroll had a real talent for rhyme and meter, but in "The Hunting of the Snark" toward not other end than to make the colossal and delightfully well-versed joke that is this poem.Perhaps the strangest thing with Carroll is his consistency. He makes a bizarre statement that you think has no relevance to the story whatsoever, and then it ends up being referenced constantly in the remainder of the poem.I would also recommend this to any writer suffering from "taking-oneself-too-seriously syndrome". This poem will knock it right out of you.

The Hunting of the Snark is another masterpiece of nonsensical verse from the inimitable mind of the author of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and Jabberwocky. Lewis Carroll was a master of the art of writing of nonsense that was not really nonsense, as exemplified in The Hunting of the Snark. On one level this story, about the hunt for a mythical creature by a ship's crew made up of assorted strange characters, makes absolutely no sense at all. However, on deeper consideration, the story is perfectly comprehensible. In fact, there are scholars who believe that yet deeper meanings are concealed within the work, and that the poem was actually written in cypher. The individual reader will have to decide for himself, and will undoubtedly enjoy the experience.

There is nothing for me to add to the mountains of praise already out there for this masterpiece of nonsense literature – arguably the finest sustained piece there is, with only William Gilbert and Thomas Hood to rival it.As the Victioran languge is sometimes a little dated, readers might care to go instead for Martin Gardner’s Annotated verion that explains everything in detail (too much detail for some tastes). The Annotated Hunting of the Snark (The Annotated Books)

This is a whacky nonsense poem. There are a couple of beautifully illustrated versions of this story, but I really like this one. It has a more Victorian feel than other versions, which I appreciate considering when the poem was written. I highly recommend!

Pure fun nonsence. Or is it? Worth the exploration. And the Hunt. Had never heard of this until an episode of Inspector Lewis revolved around it.

I heard it mentioned in a BBC drama and wondered what the fuss was about. They mentioned that it is "studied" at Oxford and there are people who believe it holds some secret code. I agree there is a message beyond the nonsense of the story, but I believe it is not so mystical and hidden as some might think.

Im Juli 1874 machte Lewis Carroll einen Spaziergang als ihn die Muse küsste. Er hatte einen Satz gefunden, der ihn nicht mehr los lies: "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Zwar wusste er noch nicht, was dieser Satz bedeuten sollte, aber über die nächsten zwei Jahre erforschte er die Bedeutung dieses letzten Satzes seines Nonsensgedichtes. Das Ergebnis war "The Hunting of the Snark". Carrol selber gab nie eine Interpretation oder Erklärung des Gedichtes, er behauptete immer, er wüsste nicht, was es bedeutet, ihm gefiele aber die Erklärung eines Leser, dass es eine Allegorie auf die Suche nach dem Glück ist.Das Gedicht erzählt die Geschichte einer bunt gemischten Schiffscrew, die auf die Insel des Jabberwock reist um dort einen Snark zu fangen. Es gibt viele Unterarten von Snarks, die gefährlichste ist der Boojum, wer ihm begegnet, löst sich in Luft auf.Gewidmet ist das Gedicht in Form eines Akrostichons einer gewissen Gertrude Chataway. Wer Terry Pratchett oder Douglas Adams Werke liebt, wird viel Spaß an diesem Gedicht haben. Douglas Adams auf die Frage nach dem Universum und dem ganzen Rest scheint ebenfalls von diesem Gedicht bzw. allgemein von Lewis Carrolls Werk beeinflusst, denn die 42 kommt in diesem Gedicht gleich zweimal vor:1. Carroll war 42, als er dieses Gedicht schrieb2. He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,Zur Kindle Edition:Leider fehlen die Zeichnungen von Henry Holiday. Ich würde daher empfehlen, das Gedicht lieber direkt beim englischen Gutenberg Projekt herunterzuladen, da sind zumindest alle offiziellen Bilder enthalten, wenn auch die unterschlagene Zeichnung des Snarks fehlt, oder sich die Bilder auf Wikipedia anzusehen.Es gibt zwei verschiedene Kindle Ausgaben. Diese ist von der Schrift her besser formatiert als  The Hunting of the Snark , wo für das Gedicht Courier oder ein Derivat dieser Schrift verwendet wurde. The Hunting of the Snark

Vielleicht kennt der ein oder andere die groteske Geschichte um den Snark. Im angelisächsischen Sprachraum ist die Story ein Klassiker. Um so mehr habe ich mich über dieses Amazon-Angebot gefreut. Es ist eine optisch kaum bearbeitete Ausgabe, worin gleichzeitig der Reiz dieses E-Büchleins liegt. Fazit: Ein großer Lesespaß!

Nothing could beat Holiday's original illustrations. With them you get a sense that they give a true depiction of what Carroll imagined. Other imaginings, however, are always welcome.I own The Snark in many other formats than the original, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, Quentin Blake, Mervyn Peake, Tove Jansson and this one by Mahendra Singh.This is by no means a complete collection but it does give some basis for a comparison and I rate Singh's work most highly by far. All other illustrators mentioned (although they have their own charming styles) do not add anything by their pictures. They are all re-drawings of holiday's originals in a new style, or they are literal interpretations of the poem's narrative. They are nice to have for their own sake, most of them being very beautiful, but they do not lend anything to the story. Perhaps illustrators are weary of re-inventing such a classic as The Snark, but Singh is not, and he does it in style. This is absolutely beautiful and well thought out. It is perfect.If you only own one copy of The Snark, own "The annotated Snark" annotations by Martin Gardner - the Penguin edition. If you only own Two copies of The Snark, own this one aswell!If you want to own more than two, I would recommend the Quentin Blake one, or the 2011 reproduction of the first edition from the British Library.

This book is a disgrace to the memory of Lewis Carrol, The Snark and Henry Holiday.If all you want is the text and illustrations, then I suppose it is a great buy. But if you intend it as a gift perhaps to someone you are introducing to The Snark, then forget it.To appreciate The Snark's ingenuity, humour, complexity etc the verses need to be one, or maybe two, to a page, and in their entirety, with accompanying illustrations to view alongside.This book is so disjointed....verses sometimes with their last line(s) overleaf, illustrations sometimes duplicated and not in their appropriate place..... and such like. Anyone who has seen a text paginated by a novice using a rubbish program will understand immediately what I mean.I had a similar experience with another "instant print" book from Amazon (de Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes) and, frankly it is fit only for pulpingI am disappointed that Amazon even allows these badly produced books to be available. The technology needs a few more generations of development

The first problem is that it's very hard to just read the poem. Each stanza is rendered in a large fixed-pitched font, with the result that when a standard-size Kindle is set to a medium font size almost every line of the poem splits onto two lines on the screen. Even with the Kindle display set to the smallest font size many of the lines wrap. This is made worse because the entire stanza is indented from the left margin so there's less width available. As is customary, even-numbered lines are indented further than odd ones - but very much further than necessary. And the indentation of odd-numbered lines is not consistent. And the continuations of the wrapped lines are not indented at all. Here's how one stanza appears at my usual reading settings: A Billiard-marker, whose skillwas immense, Might perhaps have won morethan his share-- But a Banker, engaged at enormousexpense, Had the whole of their cashin his care. (19.4.6)Every stanza and every heading has an unexplained consecutive number like the one above. Fit 1 verse 1 is numbered "19.4.3". Go figure. In addition:* Captions to the pictures are rendered in a normal serif font which is infinitely easier to read than the verse.* There is no space between captions and verses.* There's no "widow and orphan" control, so often one gets an incomplete stanza at the bottom of a page.* Hyperlinks to the "eNotations" are indicated by heavy black underlines which are a further distraction.In short, the layout makes this absolutely the wrong edition to choose if you want to read the poem. So it must stand or fall by the value of its annotations. The benchmark is of course Martin Gardner's 1962 _Annotated Snark_. Pam Sowers doesn't equal Gardner's polymathy and seeming authority. Some annotations seem trivial, and sometimes she gets the facts wrong.For example, her discussion of the opening phrase "Just the place for a Snark" begins with the great Victorian explorers and the Empire, with a digression on the dodo, which "was hunted by British sailors for food when it was discovered on a remote island; it was preserved as a stuffed scientific specimen; its discovery was treated as an example of British scientific superiority".In fact, Mauritius, where the dodo lived, was discovered first by Arab and then by Portuguese sailors. The oldest surviving descriptions are from 17th century Dutch sources, and the bird became extinct about the end of the 17th century, when the island had long been controlled by the Dutch. The dodo wasn't a British discovery and was long extinct by the time significant numbers of British sailors reached Mauritius.All the same, some of Sowers's annotations are very interesting and use sources not available to Gardner. So if you want to know as much as possible about the inwardness of the Hunting of the Snark, you need this edition.One last point: The file works fine on my Kindle but freezes when I try to use it with the Kindle reader on my Windows Phone 8 device.