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WILDE, Oscar.

The Sphinx.

Stock Code
107266
London, Elkin Matthews and John Lane, The Ballantyne Press, 1894
£32,500

'the most exquisite of all Wilde's first editions...so beautiful that, read in any other format, it seems to lose half of its power' (Wright, Oscar's Books, 2008).

Overseen at Wilde's request by his friend the artist, designer and typographer Charles Ricketts, The Sphinx is pre-eminent amongst the precursors to Ricketts and Shannon's Vale Press, simultaneously a masterpiece of baroque poetry and of book-production. It perhaps best enshrines the spirit of the aesthetic movement, entirely artificial in conception, a work of beauty almost for beauty's sake. Ricketts considered the designs for the illustrations and for the original vellum binding amongst his best work.

The total print run comprised two hundred and twenty-five copies, this is good example of one of the rare twenty-five large paper copies, the other two hundred were on small paper, of which a considerable number were destroyed in a fire at the Ballantyne Press where the unsold copies were

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Description

Limited edition, one of 25 deluxe large paper copies; 4to; printed in green, red and black, illustrations by Charles Ricketts, some minor spotting to extremities and frontispiece tissue-guard, otherwise very good; publisher's decorative vellum gilt, signed by CR (Charles Ricketts) and HL (Henry Leighton, binder), original cloth ties (lightly spotted), uncut edges, covers a little bowed, spine a little darkened, otherwise, also very good; preserved in a custom-made cardboard slip-case.


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Stock ID:107266

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