The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
East Aurora, New York: The Roycrofters, 1908. [Hunter, Dard]. Full-Leather. Fair / No Jacket. Item #2332322
Boards rubbed with minor loss from edges, stain across about 1/3 of area on all pages.
71 pp. Oblong, limp leather with lighter stamped titles and borders, stiff brown endpapers. Designed by Dard Hunter, without attribution. Hunter worked for The Roycrofters briefly at the beginning of his career, this work was released the year he married and moved to Vienna. They later returned to the United States, and in 1912 he began printing books about papermaking. In so doing he became the first person to produce a book entirely through his own work: he wrote the text, designed and cast the type, did the typesetting, handmade the paper, and printed and bound the book. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous 'Omar Khayyam clubs' were formed and there was a 'fin de siecle cult of the Rubaiyat.' FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translation efforts in English, Hindi and in many other languages.
Price: $200.00