Jane gave me the starting idea for researching playing cards, and I ended up spending the largest amount time on that aspect. It's a fascinating world and I really only scratched the surface. The Alice connection seemed like a logical one, given this rhyme. Discovering Sir John Tenniel's fame and influence over Carroll was especially interesting to me. Even though the rhyme is a good, solid one, there is still much to be uncovered about its history that I was not able to solve. Some notes on how I proceeded:

Carol started her playing card history search in the Library of Congress online catalog and continued it in Catnyp, The New York Public Library's online Research Catalog. She spent a lot of time at NYPL, and although they still had a lot of the books in their "vault," many were in such fragile condition that she did not even really use them, for fear they would disintegrate in her hands. The paper felt like the dry layers you peel off an onion. It crumbled just like them, too.

I ended up locating a copy of one of the best books, Benham's Playing Cards, at an online rare book web site called the Advanced Book Exchange (www.abebooks.com.) There, I learned I could purchase a relatively inexpensive copy of the book at Michael Canick Booksellers in New York. This is a fascinating little rare book store specializing in magic, mystery, cartoons, and illustrated books. Strangely, the copy I bought was a discard from the Troy-Miami (Ohio) County Public Library. How it ended up on the Upper East Side, we'll never know.

I did not spend much time on Internet sources, since most of the best stuff for this topic is still in print form. That is, I only used the Internet to find print sources, not Internet sources. (The Internet Movie Database is the one exception to this.)

I probably spent too much time engrossed in the biographes of Carroll, looking for clues about the rhyme. (They didn't yield any.) But he was such a wacky character, I was completely drawn into his world.

My research into the history of the rhyme was guided mostly by the books owned by Jane and Kay. The most useful book I found in Rutgers Library was the Hancher book on Tenniel's illustrations. It is amazing to see how Carroll illustrated his story and to compare those illustrations to Tenniel's. Carroll's Alice in the pool of tears really looks like a corpse. I would definitely buy this book, if I found a used copy of it somewhere.

Finally, as to method, I found I had to make an outline while working on this project. This is something I generally never do. But there were so many threads, it really helped in organizing my thoughts. There are still many unanswered questions, and I hope some young scholar will see this work and get interested enough in it to continue.