The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

London: Methuen & Co, 1901. Later edition. Fine. One of sixty copies on handmade paper, fifty of which were for sale. An excellent, Fine copy. Beautifully bound in full brown crushed morocco with boards elaborately decorated in gilt. Upper board with delicate floral design inlaid in red and green morocco. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Hand-painted endpapers. Turn-ins ruled in gilt. A lovely, wide-margined copy in a very attractive binding.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, compiled and translated by Edward FitzGerald, was first published in 1859. The work was a loose adaptation of a group of poems then attributed to the Persian astronomer Omar Khayyam (though modern scholarship has revealed that the poems were likely the work of a number of authors). Though FitzGerald's publication was not immediately popular, it received its due appreciation in 1861, when the Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes bought a copy in 1861 and passed it to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In turn, the poet shared it with his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, and John Ruskin. Championed by Rossettii and his circle, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam soared in popularity. "Like the Odyssey or the Vita Nuova [it] was once the most widely known and quoted work of Victorian poetry in the world," and its place in Western culture at the time was secured by FitzGerald's "epigrammatic, sophisticated, often mordant verses [that] display FitzGerald's adroitness in handling this stanza form" (Warner). Throughout the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the work saw countless finely-printed, expertly-bound, and lavishly-illustrated editions, of which this is one. Fine.