“THE CULT OF PERVERSITY AND IRONY”: BEARDSLEY’S FAMED PERIODICAL THE YELLOW BOOK, WITH HUNDREDS OF STRIKING ART NOUVEAU ILLUSTRATIONS

(BEARDSLEY, Aubrey). The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane [The Bodley Head]; Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894-97. Thirteen volumes. Octavo, original black-stamped pictorial yellow cloth, uncut and partly unopened.

Early printings of all 13 volumes of Beardsley’s celebrated art-nouveau quarterly, profusely illustrated with 220 plates after designs by Beardsley, Sickert, Crane, Sargent, Beerbohm, Leighton and many others. With literary contributions by such distinguished men of letters as Yeats, Wells, James, France, and Grahame.

“The Yellow Book is arguably the best-known cultural artifact of the 1890s in Britain. Every book about the period reproduces at least one Beardsley title-page, drawing, or cover; every exhibition on Art Nouveau or turn-of-the-century book illustration includes a representative volume; and virtually every private and public collection of consequence has on its shelves a set of the 13 distinctive volumes” (Lasner, Yellow Book Checklist, 5). This renowned journal was conceived in 1894 by Beardsley and the American novelist Henry Harland, who explained: “Beardsley and I sat together the whole afternoon… We thought it quite a pity that London publishers should feel themselves under any obligation to refuse any of our good manuscripts… And then and there we decided to have a magazine of our own… Beardsley was responsible for the cover designs for the first five volumes and more importantly, for setting the aesthetic tone for the entire publication.” “It was the fin-de-siècle morbidity and eroticism in his work which made Beardsley notorious. The cult of perversity and irony was given further stimulus through his contributions to two of the sacred books of the Aesthetic Movement, The Yellow Book and The Savoy” (Harthan, 235). The Yellow Book continued publication until 1897, opening its pages to a wide variety of artists and writers, whose collective efforts exemplified the cultural spirit of the turn-of-the-century. It is nearly impossible to determine which edition a Yellow Book is, as “so many sets have been ‘made up’ and the details are so perplexing that rational codification may well prove impossible” (Lasner, 65). This set is comprised of issues without advertisements: “Since the original issue—those in fact printed during the 1894-97 run—meant to include publisher’s advertisements bound in at back, no volume without the advertisements can be a true first edition” (Lasner, Yellow Book Checklist, 9-10). All volumes are apparently early printings, since none bears the front-cover stamp of a later edition. Lasner, Beardsley Checklist 65. See Lasner, Yellow Book Checklist.

Interiors fine, cloth unusually nice with little of the soiling usually seen. A near-fine set.