MACFALL, Haldane Aubrey Beardsley. The Man and His Work.

‘A Stooping, Dandified Being’

MACFALL, Haldane Aubrey Beardsley. The Man and His Work. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head Limited. [1928.]

4to. Publisher’s cream buckram, printed spine label, additional spine label tipped in at end, top-edge gilt, the others uncut; pp. xiv, [2 (part-title, blank)], 109, [3]; photographic frontispiece and a further 10 plates of illustrations by Beardsley, plus 2 plates reproducing his letter to John Lane (see below) bound before p. 1 and a part-title and 5 plates of extra illustrations bound after p. 64; large woodcut from cover of issue 6 of The Savoy to title, woodcut of Beardsley’s ‘Ave atque vale’ to penultimate verso; slight soiling to spine label; offsetting to front free endpaper, very small wormtrack to lower corner; an excellent copy; twentieth-century booklabel of Montague Shearman and modern collector’s booklabel to front pastedown.

First edition, no. 60 of 100 special-issue copies printed on Arnold & Foster handmade paper and with six extra illustrations, including the first appearance of Beardsley’s self-portrait from a letter to John Lane.

Art critic, illustrator, and British Army officer Haldane MacFall (1860–1928) was also the author of Aubrey Beardsley: The Clown, the Harlequin, the Pierrot of his Age (1927). The other illustrations included in this limited edition are suppressed designs for vol. V of The Yellow Book, comprising ‘Venus’ (a design for the title-page), ‘Black Coffee’, ‘Atalanta’, ‘A Nocturne of “Chopin”’, and a portrait of Miss Letty Lind.

The work is dedicated to Wisconsin-born bibliophile, insurance agent, and casual literary agent Earl E. Fisk, prominent collector of works by Max Beerbohm, Holbrook Jackson, A. Edward Newton, and others. ‘Although Fisk lived in Wisconsin for all of his adult life, he maintained a connection to the British literary scene. He actively promoted the work of authors whom he enjoyed, and he helped to place books by Haldane MacFall and Holbrook Jackson with American publishers.

He also wrote many articles for The Bookman’ (Archives at Yale, online).

MacFall, in his introduction, recalls his first encounter with the then-twenty-one-year-old Beardsley, a ‘stooping, dandified being […] evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of God’s acre […] Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of manhood; and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into each twelve-month. He knew that for him there would be few tomorrows – he knew that he had little to which to look forward, and had best live his life today. And he lived it like one possessed’ (pp. xiii–xiv).

Provenance: booklabel of Montague Shearman (1885–1940), lawyer and renowned collector of nineteenth-century French masters, son of the judge and athlete of the same name (1857–1930).

Samuels Lasner 179a.

SKU: 2124718