699. The Triumph of Beauty

On last week's blog, I received some comments from readers who thought the drawing of a woman from 1890 was reminiscent of Charles Shannon's first print in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891), a good reason to put them together.

Charles Shannon, silverpoint drawing of a seated woman (1890)
[Collection: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam]

The portrait is executed in silverpoint and shows a seated woman in a wide gown; het left arm outstretched, her right is held in front of her chest. She might be engaged in needlework, but the image is too vague to say.

Charles Shannon, 'The Triumph of Beauty'
in Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates (1891)

The other plate is an image done on papier Gillot, subsequently an etched relief block was made by the firm of Verdoux, Ducourtioux et Huillard in Paris whose monogram VDH appears in the lower left hand corner.

Here we see a woman at her morning toilet. She is surrounded by four figures. Two women hold her long hair outstretched to both sides; one is also holding up a mirror. To the left in the foreground, a woman is kneeling down, as if in prayer, while to her right a seated woman (or man?) is playing the flute. Between them is an animal, probably a cat.

The plate precedes the first story in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates, illustrating 'The Young King':

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty.
(page 7)

The scene on the tapestries is not described in detail and only plays a symbolic role in the story: that of material wealth that will be abandoned by the young king for the wealth of belief in good.

One commenter suggested that the silverpoint drawing was a preliminary study for the print in Wilde's book, but I don't think this could have been the case. A preliminary study in pencil seems more logical to me, but apart from that, the dating - 1890 - is impossibly early. True, by 1890 Wilde had already met with publisher McIlvaine, who had come to London to set up the new firm Osgood McIlvaine & Co, but he had not written all four stories by then and would continue to make many important changes even in July 1891 after receiving the first proofs for the book that was published in November. I think the similarity between the two works should be called coincidental, guided only by Shannon's personal interests.

698. An Unknown Early Drawing by Charles Shannon

The collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have been rapidly digitised over the past decade, and images and descriptions are still being added to the online database. A recent search resulted in some drawings by Shannon unknown to me, the most interesting being the oldest. [See the Shannon results on the website of the Rijksmuseum Collection.] 

Around 1890, Shannon was still experimenting with different media such as pencil or charcoal drawings, watercolour and silverpoint drawings, although he soon settled for lithographs and oil paintings. 

An early silverpoint drawing has turned up in the collection of the Rijksmuseum. It has never before been reproduced.

Charles Shannon, silverpoint drawing of a seated woman (1890)

The drawing on paper (173 by 244 mm) was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1949 (object no. RP-T-1949-553); the image is described as: 'Seated woman with gown and arms spread'. 

The image recalls early lithographs such as ‘Biondina’ featuring women in evening wear, but it is rare for Shannon to depict a solitary figure frontally (F.H. Neville, Esq. from 1915 being an  exception). Also unusual is that she is not engaged in an activity, like most of the female figures in the early lithographic portraits or idyllic scenes, although she could be engaged in needlework or a similar activity - the vagueness of the image does not allow us to reach a conclusion. However, only her left arm is outstretched, her right arm is held in front of her chest.

[See next week's blog!] 

697. An Unopened Book for the Reader, Collector, Thief and Publisher

In August 2023, I wrote about the phenomenon of 'unopened' copies of private press books, and expensive commercial books. [See blog 627 about A House of Pomegranates]:

This was the fashion of the untouched book, the book as it came from the bindery to the collector who did not cut open the sections, but left them unopened, untouched and thus unread. It was a kind of tribute to the ideal book, where the object had become more important than the text.

We are talking about books whose quires have been folded but not cut. These may be commercially published works up to roughly about the mid-20th century or they may be private press or other types of deluxe publications.

Meanwhile, I wonder if there could be more cases where a book is not cut open.

The Reader / Collector 

As for the collector's behaviour, I see four possibilities: 

1. The reader cuts open the book while reading it;
2. The reader uses a knife to open several sections, but stops because (s)he abandons the book and stops reading;
3. The collector does not cut open the book, and reads what is visible by looking between the unopened sheets;
4. The collector places the book unread on the shelf to keep it in an 'untouched', 'original' condition.

An uncut copy of Michael Field, The Race of Leaves (Vale Press, 1901)

This creates three versions:

a. A book with all the sections cut open;
b. A partly opened/unopened book;
c. An unopened book.

But the buyer is not the only one who can cause this condition. 

A potential buyer in a bookshop or antiquarian bookshop is unlikely to ask for a knife and start cutting open the sections. In a library, such a thing may happen and then it is the researcher or borrower who turns an unopened book into a (partially) cut open book. In Special Collections Departments (such as that in the National Library of the Netherlands) specific rules try to prevent such behaviour, and the cutting is done (if necessary), after consultation with the curator, by a conservation officer.

The Thief

It may sound unlikely, but after theft, the curious thief may be inclined to cut open the sections of a book. I would like to know of examples of such acts. After all, the thief may be a reader as well.

The Publisher

There may be two situations where the publisher takes care of the persistence of the unopened state: when the publisher places a copy in the publisher's archive and when an unsold stock emerges after the publisher's dissolution. 

Reading an uncut copy of Michael Field, The Race of Leaves
(Vale Press, 1901)

There may thus exist both archival copies and unsold stock in uncut form. The former does not actually occur with Ricketts and the Vale Press books. The sample copies from the shop, At the Sign of the Dial, were, to my knowledge, all cut open to show the reader all the pages. This does not apply, incidentally, to the copies printed on vellum. The sections of these copies were cut or  trimmed only in the bindery.

But after Ricketts and Shannon passed away, it turned out that several issues of their magazine The Dial had not sold out. There was quite a pile of unsold and unopened copies in their original wrappers, almost a hundred in total. There were ten copies of the third issue (1893), seven copies of number four (1896), and no less than eighty-three copies of the last issue - see Catalogue of Valuable Books and Manuscripts […] Valuable Books on the Fine Arts from the Collection of C.H. Shannon, Esq., R.A. and the late Charles Ricketts, Esq., R.A. […] London, Christie, Manson & Woods, December 4, 1933, p. 49, no. 403. 

Unopened copies of the fifth number of The Dial may be less rare than copies that have actually been read without struggling to hold open the pages and look between them to read the text.

696. Silly Mistakes or Peculiar Errors (2)

Sometimes academic publications make you wonder: where do researchers get their information from? 

Inadequate research results in silly mistakes or peculiar errors. I quote last week's words (although not literally) and also promise to let this kind of oddities pass for the time being as they seem to be becoming commonplace.

The American Printing History Association's respectable journal Printing History published an article that puzzled me, not so much with its content and argumentation, but because of curious misspellings and attributions, which could and should have caught the editor's eye.

The young and promising scholar Jacob Romm wrote the essay 'The Marriage of Two Arts: Michael Field, Vale Press, and Queer Print in Victorian England' (Printing History, 35, Summer 2024, pages 48-63).

These two subjects, the Vale Press by Charles Ricketts, and the poems and plays by Michael Field, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, are always worth paying attention to. 

Biography of Michael Field (detail) on Yellow Nineties 2.0

And here, unfortunately, we see two recurring errors. Bradley's name is consistently misspelled, not with an ‘a’ (Katharine) but as Katherine, which was not her name, even though half the Internet pretends it is, while there are accurate sources online to cite, such as The Yellow Nineties.  

The second false assumption that consistently reverberates throughout this article is that Ricketts and Shannon jointly ran the Vale Press, by which, incidentally, is meant not the early period of Vale Publications but rather the later publishing firm Hacon & Ricketts. Shannon was active as a co-publisher from 1889 until about 1895, but right from the start of the real publishing company, funded by Hacon and Ricketts, he concentrated on his painting career and kept away from the publishing programme.

The oversights are related to the desired assumption that Ricketts and Shannon were a homosexual couple all their lives, whereas it is clear from diaries (especially as pages have been torn out) and later letters that Shannon maintained a series of mistresses from the late 1890s  with whom he considered marriage several times - and Ricketts was alone in the relationship as a gay man.

Their cohabitation was enigmatic to the outside world, centred on the art collection, and their household could well be called ‘queer’, but they each operated separately. The only constant in their collaboration was the focus on their art collection.

There are smaller misses, such as the claim that Ricketts designed three ‘uncial-inspired’ types - in fact, there was only one, the other two were inspired by Jenson's Renaissance type.

The essay mentions that the Vale Press issued works by 'Shakespeare, Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, and Gordon Bottomley'. Works by Wilde and Bottomley were designed by Ricketts, but were never issued by Hacon and Ricketts (or issued as Vale Press publications). It is even said that after the closure of the Vale Press Ricketts and Shannon occasionally designed books for friends: Ricketts did so frequently, but Shannon never designed any books after the death of Oscar Wilde in 1900.

A quote from The Times from 1931 stating that Ricketts and Shannon 'shared the same studio' goes uncorrected, while each had his own studio, even in their early days at the Vale Shannon had a private studio.

Ricketts and Shannon are called the 'printers' of the Vale Press books, which they never were, as they did not possess a printing press.

Thomas Campion, Fifty Songs (1896)

It is clear from small details that the Vale Press books, even those illustrated in the article, have not been studied. Thomas Campion's Fifty Sonnets are said to be poems 'about the sea', which they are not.

The decorative paper of the cover of Fifty Sonnets is described as 'green paper patterned with gold ships', while the design is printed in blue on white paper - no gold has been used. Has the author actually handled a copy of this book?

The interpretation of the border design for the first text page of Fair Rosamund is debatable: the author assumes Ricketts showed a drawing of it to Michael Field. He did not. He only imagined that drawing of Pylades as a decadent naked dancer, as he also said in a discussion of the play. But Michael Field's opinion made that ‘vision’ dissipate and instead came the figure of Fortuna. (Incidentally, Romm calls this page a frontispiece, which is factually incorrect).

As a reader, so many inaccuracies can make you despair, especially when one encounters a characterisation of The Yellow Book as ‘Wilde's Yellow Book’, when obviously Wilde had nothing whatsoever to do with it. However, most of all, I feel sorry for the author who is so poorly supervised by an editor of a leading magazine. 

Is it perhaps advisable to stop this - clearly pointless - blog, say, on reaching blog post number 700? One might wonder.