The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Folio Society Limited Edition)

A$1,800 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

Limited edition

KHAYYAM, Omar. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Translated by Edward FitzGerald. London: The Folio Society, 2009. Folio. Quarter vellum and Persian blue cloth. Spine lettered in 22-carat gold. Cover illustrated and stamped in three shades of gilt by Niroot Puttapipat. Top edge gilt, others uncut. [viii], 219 pp., with 16 mounted colour plates and original etching by Niroot Puttapipat. Housed in navy-blue buckram solander case. First Folio Society edition. Facsimile of the first edition of FitzGerald's translation, published by Bernard Quaritch, 1859, with some minor emendations. Limited to 1,000 copies, this being number 22. Numbered and signed by the artist on the frontispiece. The story of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubáiyát is one of the classics of happenstance. Published anonymously by Bernard Quaritch in 1859, initially to almost complete indifference, it was discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a penny box outside a bookshop and passed among the Pre-Raphaelites. It quickly became one of the most celebrated works of poetry in the English language and has never been out of print. The original Persian quatrains of Omar Khayyám, an eleventh-century mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur, were transformed by FitzGerald into something that is simultaneously a translation, an adaptation, and an original poem: a meditation on pleasure, impermanence, and the indifference of the universe, expressed in some of the most musical verse of the Victorian period. The Fo

• Binding: Hardcover

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