One hundred sixty years after Lewis Carroll first invited readers down the rabbit hole, we're reimagining classic literature for today's digital natives.
Emoji Editions brings beloved classics to life using contemporary youth vernacular enriched with emoji — creating vibrant, accessible gateways to literature's most enduring works while maintaining authentic faithfulness to the originals.
160 years after the original publication, Alice returns in a groundbreaking edition that speaks the language of today's digital generation. Clear, upbeat language enriched with emoji on every page, while maintaining faithful adherence to Carroll's narrative structure, philosophical depth, and logical playfulness.
"This is not a 'dumbing down' of Carroll. Rather, it is a brilliant act of translation — one that recognizes that language itself is always in flux, and that each generation must make the classics their own if those classics are to survive at all."
— Dr. Zara Lian, Looking Glass Institute for Digital Narratives
Emoji Editions maintains faithful adherence to the original narrative structures, philosophical depth, and literary playfulness of classic works while rendering the text in clear, upbeat contemporary language. Visual emoji elements appear on every page, providing what cognitive scientists call "dual coding" — engaging both verbal and visual processing systems simultaneously to enhance comprehension and memory.
"When Alice falls down the 🐰🕳️, we don't just read about it — we see the rabbit, we see the hole. The visual element adds a layer of immediate comprehension that complements rather than replaces the text."
— Dr. Helena Thornwell, Chessboard College Review of Literary Studies
From a technical perspective, these books represent a significant achievement in character encoding and typography. The editions seamlessly integrate traditional Latin text with emoji glyphs, mathematical symbols, and specialized characters across multiple font families while maintaining typographical consistency throughout.
"This book represents the culmination of a 60-year journey in character encoding. You can write 'Alice saw a 🐰 jump into a 🕳️' and it renders correctly on billions of devices worldwide. That's progress. That's the promise of open standards fulfilled."
— Dr. Robert "Bob" Kernighan III, H. Dumpty Journal of Typography & Encoding
While traditionalists have raised concerns about modernizing classic prose, advocates emphasize these works' potential to open the classics to new audiences — particularly English language learners, readers with learning differences, and young people who might otherwise never engage with these literary treasures.
"A student who reads this edition and falls in love with Alice's adventures might then be motivated to seek out Carroll's original, approaching it with context and enthusiasm rather than dread. Even if they don't, they've still encountered one of literature's great explorations of childhood, identity, and the absurd. Surely that's worth celebrating?"
— Dr. Zara Lian, Looking Glass Institute for Digital Narratives
Danslav Slavenskoj is a translator and language scholar specializing in adaptive translations that bridge classical literature and contemporary communication styles.