The Yellow Book. An Illustrated Quarterly. Volume I, April 1894 to Volume XIII, April 1897 [the complete set]

London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1894 to 1897 (Volumes 5 and 7, with the advertisements at the rear, are first editions; the balance are early reprints).

Octavo, thirteen volumes; black-pictorial yellow cloth, all edges uncut; cloth very slightly rubbed or marked; top edges a little dusty, with a few chips to some leading edges (where slit open carelessly); overall an excellent set.

'The Yellow Book' differed from other periodicals of the era in that 'it was issued clothbound, made a strict distinction between the literary and art contents (only in one or two instances were these connected), did not include serial fiction, and contained no advertisements except publishers' lists' (Wikipedia). It took its name 'from the notorious covering into which controversial French novels were placed at the time. It is, in fact, a yellow book which corrupts Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" ... The founding principles were that literature and art should be treated independently and given equal status, and Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator of Wilde's "Salomé" was appointed art editor. Indeed, when Wilde was arrested in 1895, there were rumours he had been carrying a yellow-bound book. Though this was actually Pierre Louys's French novel "Aphrodite", a confused crowd thought it was a copy of this magazine, and gathered to throw stones at the publishers's offices' (British Library website). 'Beardsley's role as art editor of "The Yellow Book" was abruptly terminated following Wilde's arrest for homosexual offences, in April 1895.... This was purely guilt by association, but association was more than accidental. If Wilde gave the Decadence its voice, Beardsley was instrumental in developing its imagery; he illustrated Wilde's "Salomé" in 1894, and the two were associated as fellow degenerates. His illustrations were provocative and his covers projected that vision before a page had been turned; ... his covers constituted the text's public face ..., advertising a perverse world of transgressive sexuality. Before he was condemned for his illustrations, he was condemned for his bindings.... In his four designs for "The Yellow Book" (Volumes 1-4), which are printed in outline on coloured cloth, he presents his characteristic iconography of distorted figures, stylized costumes, flattened space, decorative linear patterns in which naturalistic elements are refigured as abstractions, contrasts of absolute black and white - here converted into a tension between blocked shapes and yellow - and curious detail. Positioned between verisimilitude and cartoon, elegance and mockery, decoration and a journalistic or satirical reportage of contemporary fashion, his covers are a dense and unsettling fusion of motifs' (The Victorian Web, online). We might as well mention in passing some of the other contributing artists (Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Robert Anning Bell, Walter Crane, John Singer Sargent, Charles Robinson), and some of the contributing authors (Henry James, Max Beerbohm, A.C. Benson, George Gissing, A.J. Symons, Edmund Gosse, Richard Garnett, George Moore, Kenneth Grahame, Baron Corvo, John Buchan, H.G. Wells and W.B. Yeats).

Item #108671

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