Facsimile...

 

 

The Noel Douglas Replicas series; Noel Douglas, 38 Great Ormond Street, London, WC1; printed by Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd., Bradford and London, 1927

Square octavo; bound in mottled calf with gilt spine and board decorations, a gilt spine title on a crimson morocco label and marbled endpapers with gilt dentelles; 56pp. [10 Blank; (2) i-xiv ;1-21; (1) 8 Blank], on laid paper, top edge gilt. Water damage to the boards affecting the top corners near the spine and covering roughly a quarter of both boards (pages are unaffected); boards are slightly bowed; hinges are worn, with mild splitting to the head of the spine (still strong); previous owner’s bookplate on the front pastedown; previous owner’s ink inscription on the first blank page and again on the verso of the rear free endpaper; light scattered foxing throughout; text block edges mildly toned.

 

Bernard Quaritch produced the first edition of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1859 and it quickly made its way to the remainders bin in the front of his shop. After its rediscovery, its value shot up markedly: today, if I had a spare $80,000, I’d probably be able to afford a copy. Producing pirated versions (especially in America) was an option that increased circulation dramatically, but there were many licensed versions legally produced as well.

By the 1920s, the poem and its many printed versions were so popular that remembering the book’s first incarnation was almost impossible: getting back to those roots was probably the thinking behind the creation of this copy.

This is a facsimile reprint of the first edition. Technically speaking, a facsimile edition is re-print where the text material has been duplicated from an original source. As such, this was only possible from around the second decade of the Twentieth Century, when photographic and photolithographic processes first became available. If this copy had been re-printed from standing type, that is, from the original plates used and left intact from the first printing, then this would be a ‘second (or third, or whatever) state’ of the first edition, rather than a copy of the first edition.

Facsimiles are interesting in their own right, usually because they are produced in limited edition runs and this makes them rare. In the early days of their existences (and of course, in the rationalisation of their creation) the idea behind making them is to give interested parties access to works that would be otherwise out of reach, due to scarceness or price. They are produced as ‘reading copies’ but soon become collectible in their own right. In this country often-encountered facsimiles include the New South Wales and Hobart Town Gazettes – reproductions of the first newspapers produced by the colonial settlers of Australia – and Matthew Flinders’ Journal, complete with its folio atlas: none of these are cheap by any means, but they are more affordable and obtainable than the original printings.

Note that a facsimile, to be true to the form, must reproduce the format of the work as well as the words and images. The Flinders mentioned above, does this admirably, although it comes with a Perspex case that, inevitably, is cracked to some degree (not a great deal of forethought by the manufacturers there).

This reproduction of the Rubaiyat ticks all of the boxes: it presents the original text in all its particulars and also the format. That it is bound in a nice leather case is of no consequence – when the book first came out, buyers would have bought it unbound and had it cased to match their other books at home. So this arrangement is a likely one for any purchaser who made the decision to protect FitzGerald’s work.

I’m presenting this copy as the first one of my collection on this blog, because it is the one that I have that most closely matches the original version. That seems appropriate, I think. It’s by far not the most sumptuous or spectacular one that I own, but it seems to me to be an appropriate way to kick off this shindig.