Saturday 12 October 2013

"Enow..."


XI.
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow”

 
It might seem unusual for me to start one of these with a comic (especially a Garfield comic!) but it proves the point that this is probably the best known verse of the entire Rubaiyat. After all, if Jim Davis can throw it into a strip like this and be confident that the reader will know the quote, and register it as old-fashioned and corny, then its penetration into the social consciousness must certainly be pretty high. After all, no-one wants to footnote their newspaper cartoon strips.

The other clue to this verse’s defining popularity, is in the illustrations. If you look back on the recent discussions of Bull, Pogány and Dulac, you’ll see that, more often than not, the image chosen to promote their vision of the poem – as the dustwrapper image or frontispiece - is the one derived from this ruba’i. If you do a Google image search for Dulac, you’ll find a majority of the results are his “Loaf of Bread” plate.

 
FitzGerald fiddled with this verse a fair bit and apparently was never 100% convinced by it. Certainly that last word is a bit of a poser: reading it aloud always jars. On the one hand it looks like he’s forcing the rhyme by spelling “enough” in a way that makes it work with lines 1 and 2; on the other, it’s possible that he might be trying to say “even now”, but trying to force it into one syllable and to do away with the usual poetic contractions (which normally would make it “e’en now”). Either way it doesn’t really fly.

He modified it in the Second Edition, coming up with this:

 
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Second & Fifth edition

This alters the delivery of the last line, but doesn’t help at all with the rhyme, although the first two lines might be said to run a little more smoothly.

Ever since he first put pen to paper with regard to Omar, academic discussion has centred around whether FitzGerald’s translation is at all accurate and whether the sense he derived from the original manuscript is correct. Putting aside for the moment the embarrassing debacle that Robert Graves got himself into over this, the discussion has led to many attempts to re-visit the Calcutta Manuscript and start again from scratch. In 1979, Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs released their effort, published by Penguin, and their take on this verse is as follows:

 
“I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,
Half a loaf for a bite to eat,
Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,
Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.”

Peter Avery & John Heath-Stubbs

It has to be mentioned, that Avery and Heath-Stubbs were in no way attempting to derive anything other than the rawest, most basic sense out of the rubaiyat; they weren’t trying to win any poetry prizes. Other than trying to retain a four-line scheme, they dismissed the rest of the poetic format, concentrating only on converting the essential meaning of the words into English. The result is certainly not as pretty as FitzGerald’s, but it’s better than Graves’s effort, who considered himself a better poet – in fact a better person – than FitzGerald:

 
“A gourd of red wine and a sheaf of poems –
A bare subsistence, half a loaf, not more –
Supplied us two alone in the wide desert:
What Sultan could we envy on his throne?”

Robert Graves

Bleagh!

Graves also used this verse as “proof positive” that FitzGerald was homosexual. He declared that the ambiguous gender of the “Thou” referred-to, was a clear indicator that FitzGerald was playing coy about his preferences. Other commentators note, however, that the original rubaiyat variously refer to a mistress, a houri (one of the heavenly virgins that an Islamic afterlife is rumoured to be populated with), a saki (cup-bearer, or servant), or a youth: in terms of poetic economy, it simply makes sense to conflate all of these figures into one unspecific entity, and that’s exactly what FitzGerald has done. At least that’s my opinion.

Regardless of the actual words used to translate the verse, the images are pretty consistent. The notion of escaping into a wilderness environment, eating simply and forgetting the demands of position and duty are hallmarks of Persian literature, and common to most of Omar’s contemporary writers. The notion of Arcadian paradise – et in Arcadia ego – is something that Western writers have been advocating since the Ancient Greeks held sway. Personally, I think, despite which words are being used to express the sentiment, it’s one that we all instinctively understand: there’s no finer thing than a picnic in a pretty-ish little wilderness somewhere, with someone whose company we enjoy. As a bonus, we each get to decide for ourselves whose words we think express that notion the best.

 

Friday 11 October 2013

René Bull...


 
FitzGerald, Edward, (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English verse, Introduction and notes by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Illustrations by René Bull, Smithmark Publishers Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1995.

 
Large 32mo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling and decorated endpapers; 144pp., with monochrome decorations by Willy Pogány, and other illustrations and frontispiece by René Bull. Some minor spotting to the top edge of the text block. Dustwrapper is mildly sunned along the spine. Near fine

This is my Holy Grail of collecting. For whatever reason, copies of this Gift Book didn’t seem to make it to the antipodes, so René Bull’s 1913 Rubaiyat is pretty thin on the ground down here. I have two copies - later re-prints by publishing houses - which tell me what I’m after; the real thing however, remains elusive.

 
René Bull (1872-1942) was of Irish/French descent, and was educated in Paris where he studied to be an engineer; however, like Pogány and Dulac before him, he got distracted from his original purpose and ended up training to be an artist. He returned to Dublin and began to work as a magazine illustrator and cartoonist, drawing many satirical pictures for local journals.

He moved to London in 1892 and started work with the newspapers and magazines there. His work led to an appointment as roving artist and photographer and he was sent to various battlefields to record his impressions. He witnessed the Tirah Campaign in India in 1898, visited the Sudan and saw the Battle of Omdurman, and was present at the relief of Ladysmith during the Boer War in 1900, at which engagement he was wounded and repatriated to London. His travels informed his Orientalist aesthetic and provided him with a wealth of imagery upon which to draw in his future career.

 
FitzGerald, Edward, (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English verse, Illustrated by René Bull, Gramercy Books/Outlet Book Company Inc./Random House, Avenel, NJ, USA, 1992.

 
Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in illustrated and gilt decorated papered boards with a cloth spine, titled in gold, with illustrated endpapers and a blue marker ribbon; 96pp., with many monochrome and full-colour illustrations. Near fine.

From then on, Bull threw himself into his work as an illustrator. He never really won free of magazine work and, despite some truly breathtaking imagery in his gift books, was tied to the relative drudge work of illustrating children’s annuals such as Chums and Blackie’s. While working for The Sketch, he often drew strange and whimsical machines that were a precursor (and perhaps an inspiration for) Heath Robinson’s later work.

 
In 1914, he enlisted as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; he transferred to the Royal Air Force during World War One and was promoted to the rank of major. In World War Two, he served as part of the Air Ministry in a technical capacity before his death in 1942.

 
Like Gilbert James, Bull remains a bit of an enigma in the world of illustration. He was never one of the “big guns” but his presence was palpable. Lost in the world of periodicals and newspapers – where provenance and cataloguing seem to be anathema – he has become simply another anonymous contributor to bygone endeavours. If not for his Rubaiyat and some of his other beautiful books, he might have vanished forever.

 
Books Illustrated by René Bull:

La Fontaine, Fables, Nelson, 1905
Saville, Fate’s Intruder: A Novel, Heinemann, 1905
Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus, Nelson, 1906
The Arabian Nights, Constable, 1912
Johnson, The Russian Ballet, 1913
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Hodder, 1913
Mérimée (Translated by A. E. Johnson), Carmen, Hutchinson, 1915
Strang, The Old Man Of The Mountain, Hodder, 1916
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 1928
Fyleman, A Garland of Roses: Collected Poems, Methuen, 1928
Andersen, Fairy Tales, Clowes, c.1928
Chandler Harris, Brer Rabbit Plays (Retold by Elizabeth Fleming), Nelson, 1930
La Fontaine, Fables: A Selection (Translated by Shirley Edward), 1935
Zoo Friends, Blackie, 1939
Various, The Children’s Golden Treasure Book, 1939

Magazine Contributions (where known):

“Weekly Freeman”, c.1890
“Illustrated Brits”, 1892
“Black and White”, 1892
“Chums”, 1892
“Pall Mall Budget”, 1893
“Illustrated London News”, 1893
“St. Paul’s”, 1894
“Lika Joko”, 1894
“English Illustrated Magazine”, 1894–96
“Black and White”, 1896
“Pick-Me-Up: The New Budget”, 1895
“The Sketch”, 1895-1918
“The Ludgate Monthly”, c. 1896
“Chums”, c.1900
“London Opinion”, c.1900
“The Bystander”, 1904
“Punch”, 1906–07

Herbage...


X.
“With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Mahmud* on his Throne.”

 
With this verse, Omar and FitzGerald play the egalitarian card. However, coming from two wildly different cultures, places and times as they did, their individual intentions regarding these lines were probably quite different.

What this verse is telling us is that it’s good to be free from obligation and duty, to drop the attitudes and behaviours that come from rank and position in society and to simply relax and accept everyone for who they are, not what they are. The location is specifically ambivalent – neither here nor there – a liminal space removing the individual from all context. Ease and tranquillity comes from the divesting of titles and the responsibility that accompanies them. Having discovered this equanimity within the world we can then feel sympathy for those who cling to such constructs.

From Omar’s perspective, there are subtle political ramifications to this verse. Remember that he lived in times riven by a theological divide between Sunni and Shi’ite orthodoxy (as the French say, plus ça change, plus ça meme chose) and both factions were wary of the Sufi mysticism that threatened to offer a third option. We know that Omar spent much of his life in fear of being charged with heresy and tried to fly beneath the radar on religious issues, but also that he couldn’t help speaking out on matters that he thought were important – and the Islamic schism was no less devastating in his day than it is in modern times.
 
With this in mind, the verse takes on a different character. Now it looks like a meeting between the powerful and the oppressed on neutral soil, and the beginnings of a mutual understanding that might possibly ensue as the result of a discussion divested of baggage. Now it sounds like a US-hosted, Middle East Peace Conference. Heavy stuff indeed.

The last line is still a bit cryptic. Why should we pity Sultan Mahmud? Without getting into who he was or whether he even existed, the answer is soon clear: in Omar’s day, there was both a spiritual and a temporal ruler – the Caliph and the Sultan. Given that the culture was a theocracy – rule by religious law – it’s not hard to guess that the Caliph had an unequal hold over the Sultan, especially in the case of a governmental impasse. So, the Sultan is to be pitied because he is not free to rule on his own terms; he has to toe a dogmatic religious line. In a sense - and it’s a long bow to draw but not too much of a stretch - Omar seems to be indicating a plan of attack in negotiating an end to hostilities: the Sultan, in that he is oppressed by religious doctrine too, is your potential ally.

No wonder Omar tried to keep things on the down-low.


In FitzGerald’s case the lines are less incendiary, but they still take a swing at his current orthodoxy. In this instance, the verse can be taken as blow against the British class system.

We have to remember, of course, that FitzGerald was very well off; he had no money troubles or issues about having to work, or indeed any need to justify his swanning about translating ancient texts, growing flowers and mucking about in boats. From all accounts, he was a very easy-going chap, likable, witty and self-effacing. Like Omar, he had strong religious convictions, but these were of a nebulous and unstructured character – he didn’t know what he believed in, but he sure knew what he wouldn’t condone in terms of faith. Mostly he objected to the religious options that directly surrounded him: Anglican Christianity (both high and low) and Catholicism. In his later years, he stopped attending any form of religious observation, a decision which met with disapproval from the local pastor. Calling upon FitzGerald to enquire the reason for his truancy from church, he was told that the decision was not lightly taken and that it was final. The pastor objected strongly and was shown the door with the following words:

"Sir, you might have conceived that a man does not come to my years of life without thinking much of these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected [upon] them fully as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit."

Robert Graves, amongst others, has made much of FitzGerald’s sexuality, his ill-considered and soon-aborted marriage, his close relationship with Joseph Fletcher. It’s possible to read these events as red flags indicating a certain proclivity; however, I, for one, believe that people are much more complex than a surface reading would indicate. I believe that FitzGerald was a much deeper thinker than he is usually given credit for and that he was an intensely private person. He wasn’t the type to shy away from injustice; he also wasn’t the sort who would detonate bombs beneath the Houses of Parliament to provoke societal change. He couldn’t change the accident of his birth but that didn’t mean he needed to rub anyone’s nose in it or to martyr himself to assuage anyone’s outrage or his own guilt. He did what he could and kept things quiet and steady; he helped his family and friends, hard-working men of the land (or sea), and his own staff (I don’t for a minute believe those pound-note bookmarks were any kind of an accident).

 
With this verse, FitzGerald seems to be saying that people are more important than their position in society, their occupation, or their title. Like Omar he advocates a meeting outside the general run of life, on neutral soil, where a one-to-one conversation can take place. He’s talking about getting to know one another, devoid of society’s artificial constraints. If a Captain of Industry could undertake to do this, he seems to be saying, then he would pity having to return to his Throne. And we know that this is exactly what FitzGerald did in his own life.
 
*Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna in Afghanistan (998-1030 AD) founded a mighty empire including Khorasan, Transoxiana, Cashmere, and a large part of northwestern India. His father having been a slave, Mahmud's ascent was spectacular indeed. Known as a literary luminary it has been suggested that he was rather a great kidnapper of poets and other men of letters!
 

Monday 7 October 2013

Willy Pogany


 
Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, presented by Willy Pogány, George G. Harrap & Co., London, 1909.

 
 
Standard trade edition, Quarto; hardcover, decorated boards with gilt spine-titling and decorated endpapers; unpaginated (174pp.), untrimmed and top edge gilt, with extensive decorations and 24 full-colour, tipped-in plates. Some mild softening of the spine extremities; top corner of the lower board somewhat scraped; some mild embrowning of the page edges, especially the pages containing the plates; some minor offset to the verso of the plate pages. Dustwrapper is heavily chipped at the spine extremities: from the head around to the middle edge of the upper panel, and at the tail; the bottom corner of the lower panel is also missing, but overall there is no loss of images or text. Very good.

 
“This name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable with a slightly shorter o’ and the gany’ is as the French: ‘gagne. The y’ is silent."
-Willy Pogány

Vilmos “Willy” Andreas Pogány (1882-1955) was on his way to America when he was delayed in London. Fortunately for us, because it was in London that he did some of his best work. Born in Szeged, at that stage part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he aspired to be an engineer in his youth, before deciding that he enjoyed art far better. He spent six weeks at the Budapest Technical College before making his first important sale – a sketch bought by a wealthy patron for US$24. After this, he travelled from art school to art school across Europe, stopping in Munich and Paris before reaching London in 1906. By then he had already illustrated a collection of Turkish fairy stories and he was in the right place at the right time to make a splash. Between 1907 and 1915 he illustrated some of his best works, including his 1909 Rubaiyat.

Many commentators claim that Pogány’s finest accomplishments are his Rime of the Ancient Mariner and his Wagner tryptich – Tannhäuser, Parsifal and The Tale of Lohengrin, which many consider to be even better than the versions produced by Rackham. That being said, Pogány’s Rubaiyat is a sumptuous work in the Art Nouveau tradition: the individual plates are sometimes considered to be tentative, or lacking dynamism; however, they were designed to be viewed in the context of the book as a whole, alongside its Orientalist borders and page decorations, not to be judged separately. In my opinion, the only production of the poem that is better than Pogány’s 1909 edition, is the one he did in America in 1942, which is a complete reversal of the style he undertook in his first endeavour.

 
Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in English Verse by Edward FitzGerald, illustrations by Willy Pogány, David McKay & Co., Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1942.

 
Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine and upper board titling and decorations; unpaginated (128pp.), with a monochrome frontispiece, 17 illustrations and page decorations, likewise. Slightly rolled; spine sunned; some minor stains to the boards; softening of the spine extremities; some tape stains to the endpapers. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

Pogány’s early works (including the Rubaiyat) have a naive kind of quality to them; his adult figures don’t seem particularly real, but then he was always more at home depicting the denizens of Fairyland rather than actual people. In regard to his first Rubaiyat, he deliberately chose to mould his style closer to that of the Persian miniaturists, and that work has a dedication to a “Dr. Julius Germanus” who advised him, in this regard: in this instance, his strange, doll-like figures are completely in keeping with the project. The 1942 set of images has a more confident draughtsmanship at work, although his figures – while definitely more mature – are still somewhat unearthly.

By 1915, Pogány had finally made it to New York and his reputation preceded him to good effect: in the list below, from that year on, his publishers are predominantly American ones. He resisted a siren-call to Hollywood for quite awhile, but eventually, in 1924, accepted some contracts to work as a set designer, first credited on the movie “The Devil Dancer”. This would lead to bigger challenges including the role as art director on 1932’s “The Mummy” with Boris Karloff (one of my favourite films – I knew I liked this guy!). He relocated to Los Angeles and from then on divided his time between books, film and magazine illustration, working for Metropolitan Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Weekly, Hearst's Town and Country, Theatre Magazine and American Weekly. He also penned a number of books teaching the reader how to draw - Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons, Willy Pogany's Oil Painting Lessons, and Willy Pogany's Water Color Lessons, Including Gouache - treatises that backed up his own new role as an artistic educator.

All up, Pogány created three sets of images for the Rubaiyat: the first for George Harrap in 1909 (24 images plus decorations); another set for the same publisher in 1930, covering FitzGerald’s 1st and 4th translations (12 images plus decorations); and the David McKay 1942 set (18 images plus decorations). I, myself, don’t have a copy of the second set of illustrations, but it’s something that’s definitely on my radar. Like many illustrated versions of the Rubaiyat, later publishers have re-used the original images in later editions, like the following:

 
Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, presented by Willy Pogány, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., London, nd. (c.1960).

Octavo; hardcover, with decorated upper board; unpaginated (96pp.), top edge dyed green, decorated, with 16 full-colour plates. Retailer’s bookplate on front pastedown; previous owner’s inscription on front free endpaper; minor offset to endpapers; text block edges faintly spotted. Price-clipped dustwrapper is lightly rubbed and slightly chipped at the head of the spine panel. Very good.

 
Edward FitzGerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, presented by Willy Pogány, Bloomsbury Books/Godfrey Cave Associates Ltd., London, 1988.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; unpaginated (112pp.), decorated, with 16 full-colour illustrations. Some minor stains to the boards; text block and page edges lightly toned. Dustwrapper is lightly edgeworn and sunned mildly along the spine. Else, very good.

(This is actually the very first Rubaiyat I ever obtained; the one that got the ball rolling!)

Aside from book and magazine illustration, and his film work, Pogány left his mark in many other areas: he was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and won medals in Budapest and Leipzig for his paintings; he designed the murals for the August Heckscher’s Children’s Theatre for which he won a medal from the New York Society of Architects; between 1917 and 1921 he designed costumes and sets for the New York Metropolitan Opera; his status as a commissioned artist for William Randolph Hearst led to his portrait work for the Barrymores, Enrico Caruso, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Carole Lombard and others. His murals may still be seen in New York City, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on 45th Street, and at the Museo del Barrio Theatre at 1230 Fifth Avenue.

The only real dark spot on his biography came in the form of a legal contest which he lost badly. In 1952, Whittaker Chambers, a reformed Communist spy and whistleblower to the US Government, published an autobiography (Witness) in which he identified “Willi Pogany” (sic.) as the brother of Joseph Pogany, a Communist commissar under Stalin, based in Hungary. Chambers explicitly identified “Willi” as a scene designer at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, but he was completely mistaken in assuming that there was any connexion at all between the artist and the spy. Pogány sued Chambers for defamation to the tune of 1 million dollars, but the court found that Chambers “had not maliciously implied that Willy was closely associated with a Communist leader and spy” (Time magazine). Given his working relationship with Hearst and the Hollywood community he was working amongst, you can’t blame Pogány for kicking back so hard against the slur; although I wonder what the trial’s outcome would have been under different circumstances?

By today’s standards, Pogány certainly seems to be a candidate for the most successful illustrator of his day, and by no means was he uncomfortable in his latter years. However, compared to the sheer earning power of those other great artists of the “Golden Age of Illustration” – Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac – he was definitely struggling. On the other hand though, his is definitely the candidate for the most colourful life amongst that very colourful crew.

 
Books illustrated by Willy Pogány:
Kunos, I., Turkish Fairy Tales, Burt 1901
Farrow, G. E., The Adventures of a Dodo, Unwin 1907
Thomas, W. J., The Welsh Fairy Book, Unwin 1907
Ward, M. A., Milly and Olly, Unwin 1907
Edgar, M. G., A Treasury of Verse for Little Children, Harrap 1908
Goethe, J. W., von Faust, Hutchinson 1908
Dasent, G. W., Norse Wonder Tales, Collins 1909
Hawthorne, N., Tanglewood Tales, Unwin 1909
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Harrap 1909
Coleridge, S. T., The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Harrap 1910
Gask, L., Folk Tales from Many Lands, Harrap 1910
Young, G., The Witch s Kitchen, Harrap 1910
Wagner, R., Tannhäuser, Harrap 1911
Gask, L., The Fairies and the Christmas Child, Harrap 1912
Wagner, R., Parsifal, Harrap 1912
Heine, H., Atta Troll, Sidgwick 1913
Kunos, I., Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales, Harrap 1913
Pogany, W., The Hungarian Fairy Book, Unwin 1913
Wagner, R., The Tale of Lohengrin, Harrap 1913
Pogany, W., Children, Harrap 1914
Pogany, W., A Series of Books for Children, Harrap 1915
More Tales from the Arabian Nights, Holt 1915
Swift, J., Gulliver’s Travels, Macmillan 1917
Bryant, S. C., Stories to Tell the Little Ones, Harrap 1918
Colum, P., Adventures of Odysseus, Macmillan 1918
Olcutt, F. J., Tales of the Persian Genii, Harrap 1919
Skinner, E. L., Children’s Plays, Appleton 1919
Colum, P., The King of Ireland’s Son, Harrap 1920
Colum, P., The Children of Odin, Harrap 1922
The Adventures of Haroun El Raschid, Holt 1923
Newman, I., Fairy Flowers, Milford 1926
Flanders, H. H., Looking Out of Jimmie, J.M. Dent 1928
Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dutton 1929
Pogany, W., Mother Goose, Nelson 1929
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Harrap 1930
Anthony, J., Casanova Jones, Century 1930
Pogany, W., Magyar Fairy Tales, Dutton 1930
Burton, R. F., The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, McKay 1931
Huffard, G. T., My Poetry Book, Winston 1934
Pushkin, A., The Golden Cockerel, Nelson 1938
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, David McKay 1942

 
Filmography of Willy Pogány:
Set designer, “The Devil Dancer”, 1927
Set decorator, “Tonight Or Never”, 1931
Set designer, “Palmy Days”, 1931
Set designer, “The Unholy Garden”, 1931
Art director (uncredited), “The Mummy”, 1932
Director (uncredited), “Kid Millions” – Technicolor sequence, 1934
Set designer, “Flirtation”, 1934
Art director, “Fashions of 1934”, 1934
Art director, “Wonder Bar”, 1934
Art director, “Dames”, 1934
Technical staff, “Dante’s Inferno”, 1935
Art director, “Make A Wish”, 1937
Animator, “Scrambled Eggs”, 1939

 

Sunday 6 October 2013

Other Early Illustrators...


 
FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, with Twelve Photogravures after Drawings by Gilbert James, George Routledge and Sons Ltd., London, 1904.

 
Octavo; hardcover, with gilt decorated and titled upper board and spine; 160pp., top edge gilt, with 12 monochrome photogravure images each with a tissue guard. Somewhat rolled; all corners bumped; boards well-rubbed with some stains; spine is sunned, softened at the head and tail and with a woodworm hole at the foot; free endpapers have been removed; frontispiece is detached and its tissue guard is missing; all pages are lightly embrowned, especially at the page and text block edges; scattered foxing throughout, especially around the plates; offset to endpapers. Fair to good.

Far be it for me to suggest that, after Elihu Vedder and before Edmund Dulac, no other artist turned their hand to the Rubaiyat and produced an illustrated version of the poem. On the contrary: once Vedder had proposed the possibility, illustrated versions flourished, reaching a peak in 1909 with Dulac and Willy Pogany (of whom, more later). Technology was the time-keeper in this race however, and the production of Rubaiyat copies marched to its beat.

It’s good to remember that Vedder’s images for his version of the poem contained the text as an intrinsic part of the illustration: that is, the text was hand-written onto the image so that text and image could be printed at the same time. This was a cheap work-around past the problem that text and images could not, at that stage, be printed concurrently. Another way around the issue was to print the images separately and then to glue, or “tip in”, these plates onto blank pages within the printed text block. This was done by hand and was very time-consuming.

Many illustrators turned their hands to productions of the poem, often simply designing the book or providing a single frontispiece image (which brought down production costs). Designing meant providing repeat images or patterns to be used as endpaper decorations, margins, chapter headings or colophons (those intricate images which signal the end of a section within a book). Designing a book extended to the typeface and font of the text and occasionally required large initials to be created also. Many exercises in two-colour process printing came of these simpler, less pictorial editions. A well-designed book gave a sense of a unified production and made the work seem more satisfying.

Which brings us to Gilbert James. James is probably the most enigmatic of the Rubaiyat illustrators, since very little is known about him. He was (as far as can be determined) born in Liverpool and illustrated several collections of fairy tales. Between 1896 and 1898, he published many images inspired by the Rubaiyat in the magazine The Sketch, for which he worked along with several other journals. These were collected together in one volume in 1898 by the publisher Leonard Smithers of London and sold well. The original set of images were monochrome drawings; those images were re-used via the photogravure process for the 1906 re-release shown above. By this time, these new photographic processes had also been thrown into the mix of technological innovations with which the printing world was experimenting.

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Gilbert James prepared no less than three complete sets of images for different editions of the Rubaiyat. His style sits squarely in the Orientalist school of Rubaiyat illustrators. Vedder’s images, no doubt informed by the Italian surroundings amidst which he prepared them, are a Classical imagining, tinged with overtones of the Art Nouveau: they have been called the first Art Nouveau works produced in America. Dulac’s work too, is Orientalist in nature but is far more lavish than the images produced by James: his drawings are far more static and sombre, obviously informed by the more introspective and gloomy imagery of the poetry. By that fateful year 1909, James had also moved into the world of colour and his best known set of pictures took full advantage of the new printing processes:

 
FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, A. & C. Black Ltd., London, 1946.

 
Octavo; hardcover, with decorated spine and upper board and blue titling on black decorative labels; 136pp., with a full-colour frontispiece and 7 plates likewise. Boards slightly fanned; retailer’s bookplate to front pastedown; offset to endpapers; text block edges faintly spotted. Price-clipped and over-printed dustwrapper is well-rubbed and chipped along the edges and the extremities of the spine panel; a tipped-in note from the publisher appears on the front flap. Good to very good.

If anything negative can be said about James’ catalogues of Rubaiyat images, it is that he tends to recycle his imagery again and again. Most of his pictures contain the same two figures – a poet in kaftan and tarboosh accompanied by a saki, or cupbearer – in various bucolic landscapes, with little or no relevance to the verse they appear alongside. Different editions show slight re-workings of older compositions, which suggests either time-pressure or laziness on his part. Some images are tentative or banal; others dynamic and masterful: either way, they are a handsome addition to the text wherever they appear.

 
Another artist who contributed early to the Rubaiyat phenomenon was Sir Frank Brangwyn. His first edition was produced by the London company of Gibbings in 1906. Unlike Gilbert James, who remains mostly anonymous, Brangwyn is very well known indeed, a member of the peerage and of the Royal Academy. While my collection lacks a copy of the first Brangwyn edition, I do have copies of two later editions.

 
FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Illustrated by Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A., T.N. Foulis, London, 1911.

 
Square octavo; hardcover, with gilt upper board and spine titling; 128pp., untrimmed and top edge gilt, with half-tone decorations on each page with coloured initials, and a full-colour, tipped-in frontispiece, with seven additional plates, likewise. Very slightly rolled; boards well-rubbed with some stains and corners bumped; spine sunned; minor scattered foxing throughout; several pages towards the end have been roughly opened; plate number six has been folded and one-third has come away (now missing). Else, good.

Brangwyn’s illustrations are expressionistic and are a distinct departure from the Art Nouveau and Symbolist leanings of Vedder and James. Nevertheless he manages to capture an idyllic and vivacious Oriental sensibility which places him firmly in that camp of illustrators. His almost Impressionist portrayals of light and water lend a strong sense of place throughout his images, a place which, arguably, owes more to countryside England than the Middle East. That being said, his pictures ground the philosophy of the poetry in a “real” context and steers the imagery away from the heavily choreographed formality of the Art Nouveau.

 
FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám, Introduction by Joseph Jacobs, designs by Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A., Sampson Low, Marston & Company, London, n.d. (c.1932).

 
Octavo; hardcover, bound in full brown morocco with gilt spine and upper-board titling with gilt decorations, decorated endpapers; 135pp., top edge gilt printed in green with decorations, with a full-colour tipped-in frontispiece and three plates likewise, one bound in. Top hinge starting; previous owner’s ink inscription to front free endpaper; spine head heavily chipped; corners bumped; offset to endpapers; text block and page edges lightly toned; mild scattered foxing throughout. Good.

Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956), along with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is one of only a handful of well-known artists who took to illustrating the Rubaiyat. Brangwyn was a regular contributor to the Royal Academy’s exhibitions and turned his artistic attentions to furniture, pottery and work in murals. He created two portfolios of images based upon the Rubaiyat in the early years of the Twentieth Century most of which are taken from small works in oil. As with James’ images, these were used again, whole and in part, across the next hundred years by a wide variety of publishing houses.