The Sphinx.

Laid into this copy a sheet of hand-made paper water marked 'DE LA RUE & CO LONDON', on which in Wilde's hand are seven lines of manuscript comprising couplet 32 (as published) and slightly variant versions of the preceding and succeeding lines.

'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 preeminent 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 copies, twenty-five on large paper, and two hundred on small paper, of which a considerable number were destroyed in a fire at the Ballantyne Press where the unsold copies were stored (Rickets, Recollections of Oscar Wilde, 1932). The paper is notorious for spotting and, in more extreme cases, browning, but this copy is relatively lightly impacted.