ALICE COLLECTORS: Claire and Her Everyday Wonderland: @alicecollectoruk

 Every morning, Claire turns her collection into a ritual of alicedelic curation. With more than 200k followers across different platforms, she has transformed her English home into a wonderland where Disney pieces prevail but mingle with a wide range of books, Japanese treasures and European antiques. Everything glows with a cinematic light, even though captured on her i-phone. Her unboxings are acts of discovery. Each object makes its debut in carefully staged scenes, shelves become dreamlike displays and order itself turns into a form of play. 

 Claire is also a crafter. She hand-painted a White Rabbit dolls house with miniature furniture and created an Alice junk journal from the original texts and illustrations. Her spaces extend the magic of Wonderland: a collection room safe from her three cats, a summerhouse inspired by Mary Blair’s White Rabbit cottage with tea, succulents and an outdoor library, and a dining room prepared for whimsical teas with mismatched crockery. 

Even her biscuit box, painted with the White Rabbit and filled with handmade clay cookies, tells its own story. For Claire, collecting is not only about objects but about weaving passion, imagination and enchanted living into everyday life.

 

 

ALICE COLLECTOR: Meet Jenn Thorson ✨ @jenn_thorson_author

 

Writer, collector, and dreamer from the U.S., Jenn has created her very own Wonderland at home. Every corner is themed: books, dolls, original artworks, and reinterpretations of Alice fill her shelves and rooms. Everyday objects turn fantastical, blending into dioramas and mashups where Alice meets wizards, monsters, Doctor Strange, Oz, and other heroes. She organizes her treasures mostly by color palette, with older pieces downstairs and newer Disney or Gothic Alice items upstairs. Her fascination began with Carroll’s original books, especially Through the Looking-Glass, along with the 1970s Fiona Fullerton film and Tim Burton’s Alice. She fell in love with the Wonderland aesthetic and extended it to her entire house.

 Jenn also explores creative expressions beyond collecting: she makes cosplay costumes and creates decoupage art inspired by movies, adding even more layers of imagination to her world. Online, she shares her passion on Instagram and through a richly illustrated Facebook profile, where she posts about her collection and connects with collector communities. She also gives updates on her creative projects, including The Curious Case of Mary Ann, a whimsical mystery novel about the White Rabbit’s housemaid, which gained a continuation with The Trouble with Tweedle, the second book in the series. 

For her, collecting means pure joy and the everyday feeling of living inside Wonderland. Among her most special pieces are paintings by an artist friend, including the White Rabbit dressed as a Whovian Time Lord and her cat Alice portrayed as an adventurer in blue. She still dreams of adding American McGee figures to her world. 

 🌟 And what is Alice to her? “It’s a wonderful blend of imagination and magic, escapism and satire. It explains the mad things that go on in life but also adds a sense of whimsy to it. I love the wor
dplay and imagery of it, and the sense of a world within our world. There’s a line from the song Cheshire Kitten that, in reference to Wonderland, says ‘if you can find it in your dreams, you can find it in your day job.’ And that’s sort of how I feel about it.

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Collector: Joel Birenbaum @joelbirenbaum

 

Joel Birenbaum first encountered Alice in Wonderland in the 1960s, when he discovered 'The Annotated Alice' by Martin Gardner. That reading sparked a deep fascination. His actual journey as a collector began later, but a milestone came when he acquired the 1969 limited edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated and signed by Salvador Dalí. From that point on, he was drawn to extraordinary artistic interpretations of Carroll’s tale. 

His collection has grown to include rare and modern editions, first editions, translations, and limited runs, but also ephemera, memorabilia, toys, dolls, art, and unusual objects. Among his most treasured pieces is a Cheshire Cat sculpture by Graham Piggott, modeled with Joel’s own face. Another highlight is a series of twenty-seven watercolor paintings by Dominic 

Murphy, fifteen of which now line the staircase of his Carroll library, transforming it into a living gallery. But Joel is not only a collector. In the 1980s, he founded the Alice in Wonderland Collectors Network, which began as a simple exchange of lists sent through the mail. With the arrival of the internet, it became one of the largest collector communities in the world. Today, the Facebook group he administers brings together more than 13,000 members, from beginners to specialists, all united by their passion for Carroll’s creations. His taste in Alice illustrations is wide-ranging, but he is especially drawn to images that explore the dark side of Wonderland or present visions radically different from Tenniel’s. 

For him, the value of an item is not just in rarity, but in the joy it brings and the connections it fosters with fellow collectors. Over the years, Joel has written for the Knight Letter, contributed to catalogs, co-curated shows, and helped bring to life the Alice 150 celebrations in New York City in 2015. Alice continues to spark his curiosity, and he still delights in finding new creations inspired by Wonderland. For Joel, collecting is about imagination, friendships, and keeping Carroll’s world alive across generations.

 

The BURSTEIN COLLECTION

 

 This is one of the most fascinating Carrollian gardens I know. Begun by Sandor Burstein, it now flourishes in the hands of his son, Mark, who has transformed it into a true temple dedicated to the metamorphoses of Alice. Mark has served as president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and as editor of its Knight Letter magazine for decades. He has edited or contributed to nearly thirty books on Carroll, including The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (W. W. Norton, 2015), created by Martin Gardner and expanded with Mark as editor and art director; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dalí (Princeton University Press, 2015); and Alice in Comicland (IDW Publishing, 2014), among other reference works for readers, artists, and collectors. 

He has also taken part in exhibitions in the United States and abroad, always expanding the dialogue between Carroll and the arts. Currently, he is part of @trilogiaventuras , an immersive exhibition in Brazil celebrating Alice in cinema and the arts. His collection brings together first editions, rare translations, Carroll’s letters and photographs, as well as contemporary artworks created especially for it. He consistently seeks what moves away from the “cute” and toward the strange, the surreal, and the eccentric. We have been friends since 2009, and he was one of the founders of the Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil. 

The images show his collection in his former home in California, when it was kept in a white tower. They were taken by him during my 2015 visit for the 150th anniversary of Alice. Today, the collection is housed in the “Alice Room,” photograph by Wernher Krutein. For more, visit his site: markmywords.ws, read the book: GUILIANO, Edward. Lewis Carroll: Collections and Collectors. (University of Virginia Press; Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 2024) or his Wikipedia entry: Mark Burstein (editor). 

 

 

Alice Collector: Petal Blossom ( @petals_petals1 / @madam.ziva / @petal_madamziva / @petalbum )

 video: Adriana Peliano / Soundtrack: @pbpaulobeto 

 From Australia, Petal Blossom is a true fairy of Wonderland, always accompanied by her cats Madame Ziva and Mrs Chunky, another fairies with elegance and mystery. Together they weave a life of books, fabrics, and dreams. Once a Para-Legal, Petal dedicates herself to rare and limited editions of Alice, as well as to the art of quilting, creating an enchanted universe around her collection. 

On Instagram, she gathers more than two thousand followers with posts that feel like visual rituals. Each book is staged with fresh flowers, small sculptures, and imaginative settings, photographed in luminous compositions and angles that reveal the hidden beauty of covers, pages, and illustrations. Her collection grows with colorful, numbered, and signed editions, always chosen with a sensitive eye and the wisdom of a true collector. Among her treasures is the number 8 copy of a limited signed edition by Irene Bogo, a birthday gift from @semperluxus and Juan Carlos Solis of @Summaeditorial. The number 8 has become her talisman, guiding her search for new books marked with this magical number. 

Beyond collecting books, Petal creates quilts, bags, cushions, and wall hangings she calls Diversional Therapy. Each piece is one of a kind, born from her exclusive patterns and crafted with Alice fabrics she has collected for years, many now rare and out of print. Hand embroidery, buttons, lace, ribbons, and tassels transform each piece into a poetic fabric artwork. They arrive with notes and little gifts, always connected to the story of the person who receives them. Mine, for instance, carries details from the Alice collages I created in my books, becoming a dialogue between our creations. 

Even after facing serious health challenges, Petal continues to sew dreams and nurture her collection. With more than fifty Alice-inspired fabric artworks alongside her growing library, she spreads beauty and hope, showing that collecting is also about inventing worlds, creating bonds, and sharing joy. See the credits of quilts in the comments.

 

 

 

Alice collector: Semper Lux 1

Case 42: Sicilian Jam Crosses Dreams, Becomes a Piece on the Alicedelic Board Confidential Report Nexialist Boreau 

 Suspect: Whimsy Mimsy 

Context: Dream game involving Semper Lux (semperluxus) 

 During a nocturnal incursion, Whimsy Mimsy drifted across the shifting thresholds of deep sleep and entered the dream-kitchen of Semper Lux. There, an unusual game unfolded around a jar of orange jam, suspiciously identical to the one Alice once found empty while falling down the Rabbit Hole. 

 Hypothesis: This was not theft but a playful displacement, an alicedelic move turning the jam into a game piece traveling between worlds and impossible collections. The match remains open, awaiting Semper Lux’s countermove. After this dream fragment, I show some Alices from Semper Lux’s collection, each of them reaching for the jam jar in the Rabbit Hole: 

 

 

1. A. H. Watson (1939) 

 

2. Barry Moser (1982) 

 

3. Iassen Ghiuselev (2000)

 

4. Blanche Macmanus (1899)

 5. Laura Barrett (2015) 

 

6. Maria Kirk (1904) 

 

7. Peter Wevers (1989)  

 

 

 

8. Tove Jansson (1966) 

 

 

9. W. H. Walker (1907) 

 

 I am continuing my research on Alice collectors who share their collections online. If you are interested, please get in touch or feel free to forward this to friends who might be. You can also suggest items for Whimsy Mimsy’s imaginary collection. Generative Art: Adriana Peliano Soundtrack: music by @pbpaulobeto