Lions & Lizards...

XVII

“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep;

And Bahrám, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass

Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.”

There’s been quite a lot in the news lately about lions, so I figured this was a good time to contribute my two-cent’s worth.

What is this stanza saying? Essentially, it’s reinforcing previous rubai’s by saying that the works of individual humans are short-lived and impermanent. Jamshýd was a legendary ruler of yore to the Persians and created many great works, including a famous cup which was referenced in stanza 5. He built magnificent palaces and entertained lavishly in them. Now he’s dead and his castles are all in ruins.

FitzGerald is playing the Romantic card with this verse. Not the melodramatic, treacly, Hallmark-card of Romance, but the Nineteenth Century aesthetic movement one, which cleaved to all things natural – after the teachings of Ruskin (who, ironically, couldn’t cope with “natural” when he saw it) - especially the wilder, moodier, gloomier side of the Old Dame.

“Nature is eternal”, say the Romantics; “after we are gone, only nature will remain to erase all our achievements”. That was all well and good, back in the day, but now, humanity has all kinds of methods to ensure that, once we’re done with the planet and our time upon it, Mother Nature is not going to be a sure bet to lift herself off the canvas. Lions are an ever-diminishing quantity and Lizards are being out-gunned by climate change.

Bahrám, the other guy mentioned in this verse, was a famous hunter in ancient Iran, and the “Wild Ass”, or Onager, was his quarry of choice. In his time, being a hunter of high repute was something that could be called employment, and it was seriously dangerous: arrows, swords, and spears really levelled the playing field between all parties in those days, making the contest decidedly more equal. If it were possible for Bahrám to run into a certain American Dentist of ill-fame, I’m sure he would have a few things to say about his technique, like hunting actual, wild, undomesticated lions, without hi-tech, laser-sighted bows, and without guys in train carrying high-powered rifles to pull your fat out of the fire when you screw up. Not that I’m lauding any kind of hunter; let me be clear: nowadays, the Onager is extinct in Europe and Asia, and certainly Mr. Bahrám had a hand in that. Unfortunately, we live at a time when anything natural that isn’t being passively destroyed en-masse by our mere presence, is being actively slaughtered by testosteronal A-holes with performance issues to address. If only these morons would be content with watching DVDs of bikini-clad women shooting automatic weaponry in quarry pits, it would be okay; but no, they have to get out there and have a go themselves.

Here’s a thought, especially since it’s a Shark Year, that cyclical time when sharks roam further afield than usual and folks in Byron Bay and Perth forget that it happens every 4-5 years, get all twitchy and start talking about “culls” and “netting”: round up all the “he-man” hunters out there and dump them in the oceans with a steak knife each. Problem solved.

There are two copies of the Rubaiyat from which I’ve drawn images for this post: the first is illustrated by Robert Stewart Sherriffs, whose set of illustrations is one of my favourites; the other is taken from Margaret Caird’s set of pictures and is taken from an octavo Collins copy of the poem – usually, I come across the duodecimo version with a single image used as a frontispiece, so obtaining this volume was a definite bonus.

FitzGerald, Edward (G.F. Maine, Ed.; Robert Stewart Sherriffs, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English verse with an Introduction by Laurence Housman, Collins Clear-Type Press, London, 1947.

Quarto; full royal-blue leather, with gilt spine and upper board titles and decorations on red labels, and a royal blue ribbon; 222pp., all edges gilt, with a full-colour frontispiece and 11 plates likewise. Some sunning to the board edges and spine; chipping to the leather at the spine head; retailer’s bookplate to the front pastedown; mild scattered foxing to the preliminaries; corners bumped with some minor fraying. Very good.

FitzGerald, Edward (Margaret Caird, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English verse with an Introduction by Laurence Housman, Collins Clear-Type Press, London, nd. (c.1920s).

Octavo; hardcover in decorated cloth, with decorative endpapers; 56pp., with a monochrome frontispiece and four plates likewise. Mild sunning to the board edges and spine; spine lightly cracked; softening to the spine extremities; some mild toning to the text block edges. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

Arthur "The One-Man Army" Szyk...

FITZGERALD, Edward (Arthur Szyk, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, rendered into English verse, The Heritage Press for the George Macy Companies Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1946.

Quarto; hardcover, quarter-bound in illustrated boards; unpaginated (24pp.), printed and bound orihon style, with a full-colour, gilt-decorated frontispiece and 7 plates likewise. Boards rubbed with mild bumping; spine extremities softened; mild spotting to the text block edges and endpapers. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

“Art is not my aim, it is my means.”

-Arthur Szyk.

Arthur Szyk, like Willy Pogany, was born in Eastern Europe and, unlike many other illustrators, seemed fated to make a living in that profession from his earliest days. Unlike Pogany, however, who was mostly easy-going and positive, Szyk was contentious, darkly-humoured and, with a pencil in his hand, downright antagonistic.

Born in Łódź, Poland, on the 16^th day of June 1894, Szyk (pronounced “Shick”) was the son of wealthy textile merchants, of Jewish extraction but non-Orthodox. Throughout his life, Szyk was proud of his heritage, both national and religious, and used his skills to promote pro-Polish causes and to fight anti-Semitism wherever he found them. During the Łódź Insurrection in 1905, Szyk’s father lost his eyesight when a disgruntled worker flung acid in his face. Despite this, Solomon Szyk staunchly supported his son’s artistic leanings, sending him to the Académie Julian in Paris for his education.

There, Arthur was exposed to all the great artistic movements which arose during the start of last century. However, it seemed that the more he encountered the New in terms of art, the more he chose to cleave to the traditional, Eastern-influenced styles of his homeland, as well as developing a liking for the stylistic forms of medieval manuscripts. From 1912-1914, he was regularly published in the Łódź magazine “Śmiech” (“Laughter”), providing many politically-charged cartoons and caricatures. By this time he had left Paris and had taken up studies at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków studying under Teodor Axentowicz. In 1914 he went to Palestine with several associates to observe the efforts of jewish settlers in constructing a Jewish state; however, the trip was cut short due to the outbreak of World War One. Palestine was in the control of the Ottoman Empire and Szyk, being Polish, was considered Russian and therefore unwelcome in Ottoman territories.

Returning home to Łódź, Szyk was conscripted into the Russian army and fought in the battle to defend his hometown in November/December 1914. Whilst in the army he drew many images of Russian soldiers which were sold successfully as postcards. At the commencement of 1915, he fled the army and returned to Łódź, where he waited out the War. In September of 1916, he met and married Julia Likerman, with whom he had two children, George in 1917 and Alexandra in 1922.

Poland regained its independence from Russia in 1918. In response to the German Revolution of 1918-19, he illustrated a satirical work, co-authored by himself and poet Julian Tuwim, entitled Rewolucja w Niemczech (Revolution in Germany). The book poked fun at the German people for requiring the permission of their Kaiser to enact a revolutionary proceedings. Shortly afterwards, Szyk was back in battle himself in the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-20, which he began by working as a propagandist, and then as a Polish cavalry officer. In 1921, he re-located to Paris once more.

In France, Szyk began illustrating in earnest. Previous to this period, his work was mainly executed in black and white; now he began to prefer colour and his book illustrations took on the jewel-like aspect which became characteristic of his style. While based in Paris, he travelled extensively returning frequently to Łódź. In Marrakesh he drew the portrait of the Pasha, and he went to Geneva to illustrate the Statute of the League of Nations. For the Pasha’s portrait he received the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, for being a goodwill ambassador; he left the Statute incomplete, turning in disgust from what he perceived to be half-hearted efforts by the League.

Also during this period, he began illustrating the Statute of Kalisz, a charter of liberties which were granted to the Jews by Boleslaw the Pious, the Duke of Kalisz, in 1264. Work on the project gained widespread recognition and, before it was even finished, postcard reproductions of certain pages and a travelling exhibition cemented Szyk’s popularity in the lead-up to the publishing of the work in Munich in 1932. He was awarded the Polish Gold Cross of Merit for his effort in showcasing the Jewish contributions made to Polish culture.

At the same time, Szyk was embarked upon illustrating a history of George Washington and the American Revolutionary War entitled Washington and his Times. This series of 38 watercolour images was begun in Paris in 1930 and was exhibited in 1934 at the Library of Congress in Washington, at which time Szyk was awarded the George Washington Bicentennial Medal.

Starting in 1932, Szyk began to illustrate a version of the Jewish text The Haggadah, which contained 48 full-colour illustrations and many other decorations. It is considered to be his magnum opus. With the unsettling reverberations which were coming out of Germany however, Szyk was compelled to add many modern flourishes to the work – evil characters in the work depicted in German clothing and with Hitler moustaches, caricatures of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and many images of swastika-bearing snakes proliferated. In 1937 while in London, Szyk was forced by his publishers to amend these details before the work went to print: at the time the British Government was actively pursuing a policy of appeasement with Germany and didn’t want anything to sour the deal. Three years of compromise later, Szyk dedicated the book to King George VI and walked away from it. The Times review of the final work declared it “worthy to be placed among the most beautiful of books that the hand of man has ever produced”.

Probably compelled by the compromises he made to this work, Szyk held an exhibition of 72 caricatures held at the London Fine Art Society, entitled War and “Kultur” in Poland. A reviewer in The Times rated the display in 1940 as follows:

“There are three leading motives in the exhibition: the brutality of the Germans – and the more primitive savagery of the Russians, the heroism of the Poles, and the suffering of the Jews. The cumulative effect of the exhibition is immensely powerful because nothing in it appears to be a hasty judgment, but part of the unrelenting pursuit of an evil so firmly grasped that it can be dwelt upon with artistic satisfaction.”

Shortly thereafter, Szyk left England to travel to America, charged by the Polish government in exile to spread the word in the US about the fate of Poland and the Jews under Nazi rule.

Szyk felt a spiritual affinity with the United States and declared that he felt completely free to speak his mind (through his art). He was inspired by various governmental proclamations and pieces of legislation to illustrate these and to create works of art to celebrate them. He designed stamps and official documents, but primarily he created illustrations propagandizing the Axis powers and celebrating Allied victories. These were published in various magazines and turned into posters which, it is said, were even more popular amongst the US troops than their pin-up girls. Eleanor Roosevelt said of Szyk, “This is a personal war of Szyk against Hitler, and I do not think that Mr. Szyk will lose this war!”

Szyk’s unwavering moral compass was not reserved only for the Axis enemies. He also created many works critical of the American culture, particularly the entrenched racism that he perceived there. In one cartoon he has two US soldiers – one white and one black – discussing what they would have done with him if they had captured Hitler. The black soldier says “I would have made him a Negro and dropped him somewhere in the U.S.A.” The Ku Klux Klan were another hated organisation who felt his acerbic barbs.

Szyk’s popularity waned after the War and he eventually died of a heart attack in New Canaan in September 1951. He left behind an incredible legacy of illustrative work, not only of his war propaganda but also many meticulously designed books, immediately recognisable due to his minute, jewel-like work. Recent exhibitions have revived interest in his work and re-established him as one of the most driven and passionate illustrators of the Twentieth Century. After his death Judge Simon H. Rifkind summed up his life with this eulogy:

"The Arthur Szyk whom the world knows, the Arthur Szyk of the wondrous color, and of the beautiful design, that Arthur Szyk whom the world mourns today—he is indeed not dead at all. How can he be when the Arthur Szyk who is known to mankind lives and is immortal and will remain immortal as long as the love of truth and beauty prevails among mankind?”

Batter'd...

XVI.

“Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai

Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,

How Sultán after Sultán with his Pomp

Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.”

This is a neat little image: a caravanserai is basically a semi-permanent encampment of traders, their tents arranged in an orderly fashion around a central meeting area. These locales were designed as places where traders and travellers could meet to discuss the market, swap gossip, and rest secure knowing that there was some degree of safety in numbers on the road. You can easily imagine such a campsite settling down in the evening: a cluster of little tents each with its lamp and a patch of growing darkness between each one – effectively an “alternate Night and Day”.

FitzGerald devises many ways in which to encapsulate this idea of endless, successive days and nights, to symbolise the progress of time. We’ve seen the Bird of Time on the wing already and this is yet another urging to be aware that time is endless and that our participation in its passage is woefully short.

Have you ever wandered into a place that reeked of history? Have you ever sat down somewhere and been compelled to say “if only these walls could talk?” Well, what they’d speak of is how some “Sultán after Sultán with his pomp” stayed here for a little while and then moved on. There are restaurants and bars in Paris where tables bear plaques to indicate that this was where Gustave Flaubert sat, or that Alexandre Dumas took his coffee here: in this sense, FitzGerald is saying once more that we need to leave an impression; we need to make our mark. In one sense this is an exhortation to do something useful with the time we have. To be remembered as a Sultán and not a Slave.

There is a flipside to this, and this is the other recurring theme of FitzGerald’s work: whether a Sultán or a Slave, no-one is immune to the harsh governance of Time. Wealth and consequence doesn’t make you immune to Death. Time will get you in the end.

The closest we get, is to enjoy the batter’d caravanserai. When everyone else has moved on, the place remains. We get to absorb the traces of those who went before, to learn the lessons that they have left behind. This is the value of age, and of the old. This is the lesson of place.

When we denigrate the things that those before us have built, we deny our own past – we dismiss the lessons to be learned, the message that is Time. Santayana said it and it’s become cliché nowadays – “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”

We are what we achieve in our lives. But we are also what led to us being here. If we claim to have sprung wholly from the Now, untrammelled by the things that went before us, then we are, in effect, simply striding out of the encampment and into the dark desert beyond, a desert that is filled with jackals and scorpions and a lonely, isolated death.

Call it a caravanserai; call it Nineveh; call it Palmyra; call it the Pyramids of Giza. No-one came here of their own accord and no-one is free from the debt they owe the past. FitzGerald knew this; he saw it in the verse and he let us know that Omar knew it too.

Edmund J. Sullivan...

In my last post, I made a glancing reference to Edmund J. Sullivan (he of the pirated Grateful Dead poster), so I thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce this particular illustrator properly, although he may well be the most instantly-recognisable illustrator of the Rubaiyat out there.

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: First and Fifth Editions with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, Three Sirens Press, New York, NY, USA, nd. (c.1938)

Octavo; hardcover, fully bound in pigskin, with spine-titling on a green cloth label, upper board titles and decorations, and laid-paper endpapers; 194pp., on laid paper, top edges dyed green and all opened, with a monochrome frontispiece and many illustrations likewise. Sunning to the spine; mild discolouration to the boards; previous owner’s ink inscription to the front pastedown; rear free endpaper torn; some pages inexpertly opened; mild offset to the preliminaries. Slipcase rubbed with a tipped-on printed label, in good condition. Very good.

English, born in 1869 and dying in 1933, Sullivan was a prolific illustrator and teacher of illustration, known mainly for his drawings of skeletons. He was obsessed with skeletal anatomy and took every opportunity to include a set of bones in his commissions. The Grateful Dead poster image is not so surprising therefore!

Sullivan undertook a commission to illustrate an edition of the Rubaiyat released in 1913, and it has been in and out of print pretty much constantly since then. Unusually, he took the arduous approach of illustrating every single verse, something rarely attempted (Gordon Ross – 1873 to 1941 – being the only other instance which springs to mind). Sullivan eschewed the improved colour processes of the day and chose to illustrate in monochromatic line drawings. His images are mainly pen and ink, although within this portfolio there is evidence of a variety of technique and possibly the creeping-in of other media. The resulting images are occasionally criticised for being somewhat “cartoon-y”, but the overall effect is quite powerful and aptly serves to highlight the imagery of the poem.

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, Avenel Books/Crown Publishers Inc., New York, NY, USA, nd. (c.1940s)

Octavo; hardcover, in papered boards, with gilt spine- and upper board titles and decorations; unpaginated [156pp.], many monochrome illustrations. Light sunning to the spine; previous owner’s ink inscription to the front free endpaper; mild toning to the text block and page edges. Good.

Some commentators of the Rubaiyat illustrators attempt to place the various contributors within three “camps” – the Art Nouveau illustrators; those of the Art Deco period; and the Moderns. While a case may be made for such divisions, I feel that they’re somewhat arbitrary. Both Elihu Vedder and Sullivan are unceremoniously dumped into the “Nouveau” camp, but neither is an entirely happy fit within that style. Personally, I prefer to let each artist stand on their own merits and try not to over-classify them.

Sullivan approached his Rubaiyat images in a clever way, identifying references within the verse and creating an iconography to suit. Thus “Destiny”, or “Fate”, is depicted as a naked, medusa-like hag, complete with snake-y hair, while “Time” is shown as the standard Chronos-figure, with wings, hourglass and scythe. The main narrator of the poem – the “I” of the sequence – is an aged Persian man, while the unnamed “Saki”, or cupbearer, is a traditionally-garbed Persian woman. A strange addition is the presence of the “Creator” figure, or God equivalent, shown often as merely an arm with wings and starry knuckles. The rest is a stunning cavalcade of mitred popes, knights, animals, pottery and landscapes. The identification and depiction of these “roles” within the poem serve greatly to keep the sense of the poem – in both words and pictures – on track.

There are some odd moments. In the final image accompanying verse LXXV, the scene shows a gathering of friends and the Saki about to turn down the empty glass in memory of the Narrator. Beside her where she stands however, there are a series of concentric lines emerging from a rose bush at the centre of which is an outstretched pair of ghostly arms. Too, in the background, a tree occupying the top right corner of the frame seems half-inclined to turn into a skeleton. Neither element sits well within the overall picture: it seems like Sullivan had some notion which he wanted to inject into the scene but, possibly due to difficulty or time constraints, left it unfinished and nebulous.

Some of the illustrations are barely pictorial at all, specifically the images for verses VI, XLII and LIV. These are almost diagrammatical in nature, schematics and doodles tricked out with some scrollwork in order to fit the bill of “illustration”. Along with this random sketchiness, many of the images have a rushed feel to them, as though they were done without much enthusiasm, or with the imminence of an imposing deadline curtailing their creativity.

Some other illustrations seem to have been manually altered after completion. The “saints and sages” of verse XXV seem to have had their background edited out with a pair of scissors; and the image of Eve and the Serpent in verse LVIII looks to have been executed in charcoal, or some frottage method, instead of pen and ink. These changes, of course, may have been altered by editorial authority without Sullivan’s knowledge or intervention, rather than having been done by him personally.

Having illustrated all of the quatrains of the First Edition, the final effect can be termed almost literal in its presentation. This could be seen as a defect, but I think that Sullivan manages to skate past such criticism. Other illustrators prefer not to depict the actual imagery of a particular verse, but rather try to convey the mood or sensibility of the text as a whole; this works for the most part, but I think Sullivan, by selecting his cast for his portfolio at the outset, manages to capture sense and mood at once. If you flick through his pictures from the early sketches, his Narrator and the Saki follow a line of intoxication from joy, to maudlin regret, to hope, that perfectly captures the tone of FitzGerald’s take on the verse.

In the final analysis, Sullivan’s portfolio of imagery, at its best, is a fantastic accompaniment to the text; at worst, didactic. Nevertheless, it manages to powerfully convey the meaning of the translator, if not the author. His illustrated version was published in 1913 by Methuen; he had wanted to produce the first illustrated English version and had completed some images a few years earlier but the Publisher (whoever they were is unrecorded) to which he was attached would not commit to the timetable; he produced several more images over the next couple of years, some of which were published in local newspapers, before amassing a portfolio sufficient to encourage Methuen to undertake publication. It is likely this series of false starts which account for the patchy quality of some of the pictures. That first release was a quarto format with a coloured frontispiece, but many fans would have seen the later releases in octavo format through Avenel in the US. I have several of these later issues – including one misbound, with the binding on upside-down – and a paperback version which uses the coloured frontispiece of the original edition as the front cover. I have yet to clap eyes on a 1913 original.

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, Airmont Publishing Company Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1970.

Octavo; paperback, with illustrated wrappers; 160pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Text block and page edges toned; verso of the wrappers quite browned; mild wear. Very good.

If I was to compile a “Top Ten” of Rubaiyat illustrators, I would definitely include Sullivan in the list. It’s not just that he provides “pretty pictures to go with the poetry”, he also attempts to interpret and to decode the meanings within the verse, which makes these editions the perfect vehicles for those who come new to Omar, and to FitzGerald’s re-workings.

Postscript:

I apologise to anyone who may have thought that this was a new post - when I uploaded the initial version, there was something screwy with the final result, so I deleted it and started again. This iteration is more acceptable I think.

The Great Omars...

Working with books you get a sense of what is valuable and what is not, in any particular collecting field. There are the titles that – logically – a collector should seek out automatically, to define the range of their activity and set up the basic structure of their collection: Harry Potter fans should obviously have copies of all the canon texts, in as close to first edition, top quality, format as they can get them. But there are fringe elements to any collectible range and sometimes these are the Holy Grails of the collectors’ quests. As a retailer in the field, you get to know what’s valuable and what isn’t. For instance, a hardcover first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosophers’ Stone is paramount: only 500 of these were published – half that number in paperback – and the bulk of them were distributed to libraries. This means that few copies are not cursed with the “ex-library” taint, and fewer still are in any sort of worthwhile condition. Many are ignored because they lack dustwrappers, but the canny collector knows that the first editions didn’t come with a wrapper. If you do find a copy, you’ve scored yourself an easy £50,000.

It’s the same with The Prisoner of Azkaban, where there were misprints in the first run. Or, for collectors of early Australiana, in Surgeon John White’s Account of the Colony of New South Wales, where some of them were hand coloured (giving rise to the weird term “coloured White”) and some were not. There are myriad other instances where scarcity, obscurity - so-called “points of difference” - cause the value of otherwise unremarkable books to skyrocket. For instance, one of America’s most valuable books is a old school text which is so beaten up that it lives in a Ziploc bag - an archival-quality one but, nevertheless. It’s the fact that it’s a Latin primer and, amongst the names of the students who used it, written on the flyleaf, is listed one “A. Lincoln” that lifts it from the herd. It speaks volumes about the roots of Lincoln’s career as a lawyer and lawmaker, and thus is a tangible link to the man himself.

So how does this relate to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? Well, it’s a field open to collecting and I’m not alone in pursuing it. The nice thing about it is that there are many aspects to the books that allow for specialisation and focus: some collectors like illustrated editions; others like early British ones. I range widely, but I keep an eye out for copies produced in the Southern hemisphere, mainly Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I also try to pick up copies produced during the Wars, when paper restrictions made the Rubaiyat a perfect item for booksellers to mass produce. There are rarities and obscure editions out there and anyone with their senses honed (and a copy of Potter and of Garrard to hand) would be ready to pounce on them. A First Edition, obviously, is the Holy Grail for most fans, but at £80,000+ it’s a serious investment. An Elihu Vedder First is hardly less expensive, and recent exhibitions of his work have served to drive the price higher. Firsts of the various Gift Book editions – Pogany, Dulac, and don’t get me started on Bull! - are easier to come by, but finding one in a reasonable condition is the tricky part – many of these were dumped into nurseries, relegated to the realm of ‘kids’ books’, and have suffered accordingly. A thing I’ve always coveted – and this is really obscure – is a copy of the Grateful Dead concert poster which pirates Edmund J. Sullivan’s illustration for quatrain XXVI without credit. But that’s just me.

Limited editions and short print runs also affect the value of a book and the Rubaiyat is an instance where this kind of artificial rarity was deliberately imposed to an extreme extent. It’s the story of The Great Omars, and it’s a rollicking tale, so sit back and enjoy...

There are great books and great writers in the book world, but there are also great bookbinders - the people who actually assemble the printed pages into a readable form. At the end of the Nineteenth Century there rose to prominence a company, the works of which became a touchstone of quality in bookbinding ever since. The company was called Sangorski & Sutcliffe, and their books are collectable nowadays for their bindings alone (I have a very nice Sangorski & Sutcliffe bound Rubaiyat in my collection).

The company started from very humble beginnings. Sangorski was a jeweller from Eastern Europe and Sutcliffe was a part-time artist and leatherworker. They met whilst unemployed in London, doing drudge work to keep the wolf from the door. While on their breaks, they discussed the possibility of combining their various talents to produce bespoke items which would command commensurate fees. They thought bookbinding might be the way to go.

The success that followed was enormous. They became known for the fineness of their work and their attention to detail, and the fact that they were prepared to bedizen a book with gems if that was what the client wanted. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, they began to look around for a project that would push the limits of what they could do.

It speaks volumes of the popularity of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at that time that they decided to embark upon the printing and binding of one – one – copy of the work, bringing to it all the technical and artistic expertise which they commanded. The text and interior illustrations were printed on finest vellum and hand-coloured; Sangorski designed the boards and painstakingly stitched them together from the tiniest slivers of hand-dyed leather; finally, the binding was lavished with as much gold leaf as it and good taste could withstand and covered with gemstones – pearls, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, lapis lazuli and turquoise.

A subscription fund, in the form of an auction, was held to finance the project. Bidders were advised by mail invitation and allowed to bid and raise over a period of time, before a final bid was accepted. The more money that was laid down – and the bidding was fierce – the higher the quality of the final work. In the end, the winner was an anonymous American purchaser in upstate New York. The work consumed Sangorski and almost killed him through exhaustion. However, it was finally finished, named “The Great Omar”, carefully parcelled up, and prepared for despatch.

On the RMS Titanic.

As we all know, the unthinkable happened to the unsinkable, and The Great Omar is one of many treasures that will now never be rescued from the safe on the White Star Line’s greatest fiasco (although I’m sure I was not alone in keeping tabs on Robert Ballard’s efforts in that regard!).

Sangorski, stricken by the disaster, suffered a massive reversal in his health and was driven into early retirement. The spectre of The Great Omar hung over the company for many years as a symbol of hubris; however the company was still a very viable concern. The idea never really went away though: after Sangorski’s death, Sutcliffe began musing over the standing type and the original design work. There were enough leftover gems and gold and specially-treated leather to bring this phoenix (or maybe peacock is better in this instance) back from the ashes.

He revised the design to accommodate the available resources and set to work, keeping it as a side-project to the more serious work which occupied his team in the lead-up to World War Two: uniformly-bound copies of the classics were a pre-requisite for all battleships at the time; my S&S Rubaiyat, for example, is one bound for the Royal Navy. He worked at night in a warehouse and workshop which the company owned in the Bloomsbury area of London. There were many more pearls in this incarnation, because Sangorski had thought them too unwieldy for his original design and had dismissed them from the first project. Sutcliffe made them a feature of the new design and deftly set them in place.

Again, interest piqued when word of the project got out. Money was tight but the hunger was there and Sutcliffe seriously contemplated notions of donating the proceeds to the War Effort. It was probably with hopeful spirits that he locked the workshop door behind him on the night the binding was finished, that moonless summer night in 1941.

During the Blitz.

For Sutcliffe and his company, that was the final straw. All the notes and leftovers from the project were archived and the entire endeavour forgotten about. Until, that is, the 1980s.

At that time a certain Stanley Bray had been reading about The Great Omars and their fates and took it upon himself to contact Sangorski & Sutcliffe to see if they had any files left over from the story which he could examine, with the view of perhaps writing an article about the events. Much to his surprise, the S&S archive produced, not only notes about the events, but also several sets of the printed text blocks, unused gemstones and gold and the original design notes by Messrs. Sangorski and Sutcliffe. Stricken with inspiration, Stanley had an idea.

It was this: he would take the leftovers of the project – permission from the company pending – and reconstruct The Great Omar, using as much of the original materials – supplemented by newer additions where necessary – as possible. He sought and gained permission and was soon embarked upon a mission to recreate the doomed tome.

Stanley went back to Sangorski’s original design. Unlike Sutcliffe, he didn’t have an issue with what to do with those clunky pearls, so reverting to the first incarnation seemed appropriate. He hand-coloured the text and tooled the leather, adding the precious stones in line with Sangorski’s notes and supplementing where possible from his meagre earnings. The result, while not a patch on the original, was technically excellent and a glorious tribute to the master bookbinders’ talents. In 1985, with much general acclaim, it went to its fate:

The Reading Room of the British Library.

No, seriously: it’s still there to this day, and anyone can go and look at it.

And for us collectors out there, it’s a close as we’ll ever get to putting our hands on a Great Omar, the Holy Grail of Rubaiyat collectors!

Aureate...

XV.

“And those who husbanded the Golden Grain

And those who flung it to the Winds like Rain

Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn’d

As, buried once, Men want dug up again.”

We live in a world where everyone is unnaturally obsessed with themselves. Our culture is one where the ego is always front and centre: we take photographs of ourselves; we list the minutiae of our daily lives on social media; we carry a sharp (and, frankly, offensive) sense of entitlement with us wherever we go. It’s all about Us. Or rather, Me.

Fortunately, this isn’t the first time that such attitudes have proliferated, and, conversely, it probably won’t be the last. One hundred years ago, the prominent generation of the time thought that it knew best and that it had The Answer; those youngsters blithely went to War, took drugs, or embraced radical lifestyle choices, thinking that their sole input would be the difference that would tip the state of affairs in Our Favour. In its way it was a stark relief from the stultified inactivity of the previous generation, which had slipped into a malaise, unable to see a way forward from the many woes which beset the civilisation; but equally, it was brash and unconsidering, prone to grand gestures which could cause more damage than they solved. This is not to say that either generation got it right; as usual there was a middle way which, if taken, might have had different consequences. It’s the “Me-ness” of the activity that is its hallmark, and which is doomed – apparently – to come around in cycles.

FitzGerald and Omar talk about this phenomenon in this quatrain. “Who do you think you are?” they seem to say. “Of what value are you exactly?” And, almost inevitably, “Think again!” You might be a miser, hoarding all of your money and thinking that whoever dies with the most, wins; or you might be a wastrel, throwing away your cash on anything that catches your eye. Whichever hat you wear in life, at the moment of death you are indistinguishable from anyone else. Dead is dead. There are no winners. After it’s all over, you’re just a bunch of spoiling chemicals in a container rapidly losing cohesion; regardless of what you did in life, you end up in a hole and no-one will want to dig you up for a look-see.

No-one gets turned into gold – “aureate Earth”. No-one is more valuable or special than anyone else. Death is the great leveller.

This might seem to be an overly pessimistic view of things, but, as often happens with these two poets, there is a potential silver lining. While we are all equal, they say, our actions have a degree of permanence which lives on after us. We have the ability to create change. We are not the gold we use to facilitate our schemes and plans: that gold exists apart from us. What we do with it defines us.

The Ancient Egyptians knew this also, as revealed by this inscription:

“The strength of the Pharaoh lies in Justice.

A Destroyer’s monuments are themselves destroyed.

The acts of a Liar do not last.”

-Kanais, Inscription of Seti I

Even Pharaoh, an incarnate divine being to the Egyptian way of thinking, was not important in and of himself – it is his Justice wherein lies his strength. Justice – lawmaking; governmental control – exists apart from Pharaoh and lives on after his death. Further, Seti goes on to qualify the actions of living beings: those of a destructive bent are themselves destroyed, with all of their works; liars are eventually discovered. The Egyptians believed in a concept called “Ma’at”, often translated as “Truth”, but more accurately meaning “Correctness”. There is a way in which things should be done, a measure against which actions are judged: those who flouted the tenets of Ma’at were in for a sticky end.

The deeds of an individual stand apart from them and define their value; this is what Omar and FitzGerald (and the Ancient Egyptians) seem to be saying. Good or bad, these are the things that we leave behind us after we’ve turned to dirt. The implication seems to be that we shouldn’t think too highly of ourselves as individuals: we should just get on with things and try to leave behind the sort of legacy that will serve the goals to which we adhere.

Your name might get slapped on a new public library; you might make headlines after you walk into a subway station with a backpack of TNT strapped to you; someone might name a new species of chewing louse in honour of you; you might have cast the deciding vote allowing deadly weapons to be available for public sale. Many years later, people may wonder how that library got there, or why exactly they have to surrender their luggage for inspection when getting on a train; or how to pronounce the word “garylarsonii”. Or they might rail against the stupidity which led to a sharp rise in annual gun fatalities. And they might be motivated to dig deep and examine the various circumstances. What they won’t remember, is YOU.

One clod of dirt looks much the same as another.