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!