GALLATIN, A[lbert] E[ugene]. List of Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.

Presented by Gallatin

GALLATIN, A[lbert] E[ugene]. List of Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. New York: M.F. Mansfield & A. Wessels. 1900.

8vo. Publisher’s drab boards, printed label to upper board; pp. 24, [2 (colophon, blank)]; splitting to spine neatly repaired, boards slightly sunned with some darkening to lower board at head; front free endpaper inscribed ‘For Elbert Hubbard, with regards of A.E. Gallatin’ in ink, front pastedown inscribed by Gallatin in pencil (see below), pencil annotations to p. 13.

First edition, one of 100 copies, of Gallatin’s (1881–1952) list intended to supplement Aymer Vallance’s 1897 iconography of Beardsley’s work, ‘and contains no item mentioned by [Vallance]’ (p. 2), this copy presented to the anarchist and socialist publisher Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915).

In 1895 Hubbard established the utopian Arts and Crafts community of Roycroft in East Aurora, New York, where he set up the Roycroft Press, inspired by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. ‘Within five years the little printing shop grew into the multibuilding Roycroft campus, and the Roycroft enterprise became the largest and most complex exponent of the American arts and crafts movement. It had shops for printing and binding and for furniture, metal, and leather work; it also established training schools for the local youth in drawing, watercolor, and bookbinding […] Although he constantly proclaimed the arts and crafts philosophy of hand crafting in his promotional advertising for the books produced, the printing shop was among the largest and most mechanized on the East Coast’ (ANB).

Hubbard devoted a great deal of attention to Beardsley, curiously, in his 1902 work on Botticelli, part of his series of Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists printed by the Roycroft press: ‘A short time ago, there shot across the artistic firmament a comet of daring and dazzling brightness. Every comet is hurling onward to its death: destruction is its only end: and upon each line and tracery of the work of Aubrey Beardsley is the taint of decay […] To liken Beardsley to Botticelli, however, seems indeed a sin […] Beardsley’s work is often crude, rude and raw. He is only a promise, turned to dust. Yet let the simple fact stand for what it is worth, that Beardsley had but one god, and that was Botticelli. Most of the things Beardsley did were ugly; many of the things Botticelli did were supremely beautiful.’ Hubbard and his second wife, the suffragist Alice Moore Hubbard, died aboard the RMS Lusitania.

Provenance: The front free endpaper is inscribed ‘For Elbert Hubbard, with regards of A.E. Gallatin’, and the front pastedown is inscribed in pencil ‘I am having about a dozen later items printed as an additional page which I will send you when printed’, signed A.E.G. Annotations in pencil to p. 13 (in Gallatin’s hand?) make reference to A Book of Fifty Drawings with regard to three items.

Samuels Lasner 134.

SKU: 2125987