[RICKETTS, CHARLES]. Wilde, Oscar.

The Sphinx.

London Elkin Mathews and John Lane: At the Sign of the Bodley Head 1894 Octavo. (44) pp. First edition. One of 200 copies produced in England. Printed in black, red, and green at the Ballantyne Press for Elkin Matthews and John Lane. Wilde requested that his friend, the artist and typographer Charles Ricketts, design The Sphinx, and it was the first time Ricketts would exercise complete control over all aspects of a book's physical appearance including its typography, binding, and illustrations. The text begins with an elaborately ornate wood-engraved initial in green, with smaller decorative green initials at the head of subsequent stanzas. The book also features ten of the artist's wood-engraved illustrations, nine of which are full page. "In the pictures I have striven to combine, consciously or unconsciously, those affinities in line work broadcast in all epochs," commented Ricketts in his Defence of the Revival of Printing. "My attempt . . . was to evolve what one might imagine as possible in one charmed moment or place, just as some great Italian masters painted as they thought in the antique manner." Ricketts considered the volume to be his finest work as an illustrator. Although Wilde himself disagreed with this assessment, saying his friend had envisioned the illustrations by way of cold "intellect" rather than by his "temperament," many other commentators and critics concur with the artist. According to Ray, the book "remains [Ricketts'] most original and consistent work," while Mason notes a review of The Sphinx published at the time of the book's release, in reference to an interior illustration depicting the goddess Io, asserting that Ricketts had "never made a lovelier thing." The book is elegantly bound in full cream vellum by Leighton, Son and Hodge, one of the major English trade binders of the day, with Ricketts' graceful designs gilt-stamped on both covers. This is a remarkable copy in that, unlike most others in which entire pages are significantly marred by foxing, it contains only the lightest foxing to the endpapers. An exceptionally fine copy of a scarce edition, a large number of which were lost in a fire at the Ballantyne Press. With uncut pages, and housed in a fine cloth dropback box with blue leather backing and corners as well as a leather label to front cover bearing the title in gilt. (Mason 361; Ray/English, pp. 162-163; Turn of a Century 10).

• USD 12,500.00 > otras divisas
• nº de pedido: 20865

• librero: Bromer Booksellers Inc. (USA)