GALLATIN, A[lbert] E[ugene]. Aubrey Beardsley. Catalogue of Drawings and Bibliography.

Beardsley Bibliography for Christmas

GALLATIN, A[lbert] E[ugene]. Aubrey Beardsley. Catalogue of Drawings and Bibliography. New York: [George Grady Press] for The Grolier Club. [November] 1945.

8vo. Publisher’s blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine and upper board, plain blue dust-jacket, beige endpapers; pp. [8], 141, [5]; photographic frontispiece and 7 plates after p. 141; slight wear to cloth spine and light sunning to spine of jacket, jacket split at upper joint; nonetheless a very good copy; front free endpaper inscribed ‘Louise and Charles | Merry Christmas | from | the author’.

First edition, one of three hundred copies, of this bibliography and catalogue of Beardsley’s drawings printed by the Grolier Club, including five newly published drawings, presented by Gallatin to his sister and brother-in-law for Christmas.

The newly published drawings are a sketch from Beardsley’s copy of Jonathan Swift’s 1886 Prose Writings, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, an initial intended for Le Morte d’Arthur, a grotesque intended for the Bon-Mots series, and ‘Carl Maria von Weber’.

This work, with a frontispiece comprising three previously unpublished photographs of Beardsley by Frederick H. Evans, also reprints Beardsley’s letter to the editor of the Daily Chronicle (17 April 1894) and Beardsley’s essay on commercial designs, ‘The Art of the Hoarding’ (The New Review XI, July 1894).

Provenance: Presented by the author to his older sister, Louise Gallatin Gay (1880–1970), and her husband, Charles Merrick Gay (m. 1909), professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Samuels Lasner 186; see Gertner Zatlin 61.

SKU: 2124791