ALICE COLLECTORS: Yonatan Hyman - A Collection as an Atlas of Imagination

 @collecting_alice / collectingalice.com 

 If you have ever held a vintage edition of Alice in Wonderland with no artist credited and felt that peculiar mix of beauty and mystery, you will feel at home in Yonatan Hyman’s universe. He is the mind behind Collecting Alice, a project that unfolds between Instagram and his website like a quiet archive of visual memory, gathering twentieth-century editions with a focus on illustration history. His passion began around 1995, when he first read Carroll’s Alice in English and fell in love with its wit, absurdity and dry humor. 

What started as curiosity slowly transformed into a meticulous archival practice. From his home in Israel, his shelves now hold Hebrew translations, political parodies, ornate Art Nouveau and Art Deco editions, early color printings and obscure illustrated versions from across the globe. Among his most treasured pieces are editions given to him by his late father, early Punch magazine prints featuring Tenniel’s work, Gwynedd Hudson’s books, and a first printing illustrated by Willy Pogany. 

Among the images he shares, some stand out for their unexpected intimacy, like the wooden chairs he had made while traveling in Malawi, East Africa, around 1996: objects that quietly mark his collecting life. Yonatan’s taste gravitates toward richly designed vintage editions. He is attentive to texture and print quality, to the weight of thick paper, the charm of embossed covers and the quiet dignity of early printing techniques. His captions mix gentle irony, historical insight and tender nostalgia. 

When he posts an anonymous illustration, he often writes: “Ah, the good old days when you could publish a book packed with beautiful art without bothering to name the artist.” His posts invite viewers to look closely, compare visual details and trace the evolution of graphic design across decades. 

Explore more at collectingalice.com, where each edition becomes a small piece of a larger cartography of imagination, mapping the many visual lives of Alice through the eyes of a devoted collector.

 

 

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: David, the wanderer of illustrated Wonderlands

 @wonderlandillustrated 

 

Collector, traveler, and researcher, David transforms his Instagram collection into a visual journey through the infinite metamorphoses of Alice. With more than 200 books from around the world and over a thousand posts, his collection celebrates illustration as a living art of transformation, where each edition becomes a portal and each artist a new mirror through which Wonderland reflects itself. He moves between shelves and landscapes with the same curiosity that guided Alice. 

His feed is a dynamic collage of wonder, where books, travels, and encounters are woven into a patchwork of imagination. He photographs Alicedelic places around the world, his images often slightly tilted, escaping the orthogonal order of the ordinary, as if reality itself were leaning toward dream. David also creates short videos on the visual afterlives of Carroll’s stories. Along the way, he meets illustrators such as Oleg Lipchenko, Miraphora Mina, and Eduardo Lima, as well as other collectors who share his passion for the many faces of Wonderland. 

In his own words, “I love the story, the characters, the world, the escapism. I also love how each illustrator and artist can explore the story in their own unique way and how they are so different. It’s exciting to see a new take on the story and rediscover the vintage and classic illustrations and how they inspire future artists.” 

Among the treasures in his library are editions by Robert Ingpen, Chris Riddell, Helen Oxenbury, Christian Birmingham, and David Delamare, as well as a rare French edition illustrated by Daniel Dupuy. His dream book is the Japanese edition by @hannalice2023, whose delicate imagery and subtle surrealism captured his imagination. 

For David, Alice is both memory and metamorphosis, a story that keeps reinventing itself through the hands and eyes of those who dare to imagine. 

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Caterina in Wonderland

 @cateaparty 

“Alice is part of me,” she says. “I feel a lot like her. It contains many things that I love.” 

Caterina turns her collection into a poetic ritual. In her photos, dolls, books and scenes of tea and forest blend daily gestures with dreamlike reverie. An Italian interior designer, she began collecting in 2003 and now shares her Wonderland through more than 150 posts to more than 2000 followers on Instagram. 

A careful cosplayer, she often dresses as Alice and performs within her own photos, creating her personal Wonderland where fiction and life intertwine. Her collection is eclectic, mixing books, dolls, costumes, makeup, miniatures and themed objects, with a special affection for Disney interpretations. 

Her feed is a cabinet of imagination where books, teacups, mirrors and memorabilia appear like still-life scenes of wonder. Each image is composed with the precision of a set designer and the sensibility of a storyteller, evoking the spirit of the Mad Tea Party and the intimacy of secret diaries. She collects modern and vintage editions, organizing her shelves by color, turning them into chromatic landscapes of fantasy.

 For Caterina, collecting Alice is also about belonging to a community of Mad Hatters and kindred spirits, a place where riddles, trades and discoveries are constantly shared. “I hope to bring a little magic to the people who follow me ✨,” she writes, and her photographs do exactly that, transforming collecting into a tender form of self-portrait and a celebration of curiosity, beauty and the art of keeping enchantment alive. 

The last image, a dreamy illustration that she uses as her Instagram avatar: perfectly condenses her world of wonder: intimate, playful and luminously Alicean.

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Jules and the Art of Becoming Who You Are

 @ fortheloveofalice_ 

 

Among the new generation of Carrollian collectors, Jules shines with rare harmony between passion and creation. Her collection began in 2009, inspired by the Disney film, and soon expanded into a lifelong devotion to all things Alice. What started as a childhood fascination became an artistic vocation, and she is now illustrating her own Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, reimagined through the dreamlike landscapes of Los Angeles, where she lives. 

Her shelves combine vintage and modern editions, catalogued with care and often arranged by color, turning her library into a chromatic landscape of wonder. Among her treasures is a rare edition illustrated by A. E. Jackson, alongside other vintage gems such as the elusive edition by John R. Neill, which links her love for Alice to her passion for Oz. 

As an artist, Jules values editions that reveal both beauty and intention: unique covers not repeated inside, illustrations that flow through the story, and characters whose style expresses imagination and individuality. 

For Jules, Alice became a language of self-discovery. As a trans woman, dressing as Alice was part of her journey toward authenticity, a step toward inhabiting her own truth. Her collection reflects that unfolding, a luminous archive where identity and imagination continue to grow together. Among the photos of her collection, one image stands apart: the puppy from Wonderland, the only illustration by Jules herself.

 

 

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Gavin O’Keefe

@ groonster

 

 

 

 Gavin L. O’Keefe embodies a dual role in the world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: he is both a passionate collector and one of the most distinctive illustrators of Carroll’s classic. As a collector, O’Keefe began his journey in 1986, long before the internet shaped today’s collecting networks. His tastes gravitate toward gothic, surreal and disturbing editions, inspired early on by illustrators such as Mervyn Peake, John Tenniel, and Ralph Steadman. 

His collection spans modern and artistic editions, translations, rare books, and works by contemporary artists. Among his most treasured items is the Inky Parrot Press edition of Alice illustrated by Willy Pogany, while his dream acquisition remains Trevor Brown’s Alice. For him, Alice symbolizes resilience and the courage to face adversity, a figure of personal and universal growth. As an illustrator, O’Keefe’s engagement with Wonderland has unfolded in three distinct phases:

 • The GO Alice (Carroll Foundation, 1990), with intricate pen-and-ink drawings infused with Celtic, surreal, and historical intertexts, creating a Wonderland of dark humor and mystery. 

 • The Alice Books (Ramble House, 2010), combining new illustrations for both Wonderland and Looking-Glass, with more open compositions and a streamlined, three-dimensional aesthetic. 

• A forthcoming full-color edition, exploring emotional expressiveness and visual richness, weaving together references from Cold War science and politics to sixteenth- and nineteenth-century imagery. 

For O’Keefe, Alice’s world transcends anachronism, existing across multiple dimensions of time. 

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Linzi, the Chromatic Librarian of Wonderland

 @myaliceinwonderlandbooks 

 

Among all the Wonderland wanderers, Linzi shines for the quiet harmony of her chromatic shelves. Her collection, gathered since 2015 when she was studying Children’s Literature at university, turns the simple act of arranging books into a rainbow ritual where color replaces chronology and emotion outweighs rarity. 

For Linzi, collecting is not a financial investment but an act of resonance. Each spine and shade mirrors a fragment of her own becoming. “Alice is me but not me,” she says, “I identify with her on many levels.” She admits she gets “a little bit bored of Tenniel as I prefer other interpretations,” and her library reflects that curiosity. It now holds over 700 copies of Alice from around the world, each one revealing new ways of seeing and being Alice, with different faces, voices, and interpretations that celebrate diversity and transformation.

 With more than a hundred posts devoted to Alice, her profile unfolds as a luminous archive where colorful spines create chromatic textures within the settings of her photographs, forming a visual game that connects one post to another like a great puzzle. The materiality of covers and shelves becomes central; they are the nests where each collection dreams, breathes, and multiplies its wonder.