MALORY, Thomas, Sir; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). [Le Morte Darthur.] The Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur, of his Noble Knights of the Round Table.

In the Original Wrappers

MALORY, Thomas, Sir; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). [Le Morte Darthur.] The Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur, of his Noble Knights of the Round Table. [Edinburgh: Turnbull & Spears for] London: J. M. Dent. June 1893–November 1894.

Twelve vols, 4to. Publisher’s pale grey wrappers, front cover design by Aubrey Beardsley and printed advertisements to rear wrappers, uncut and largely unopened; pp. 990, [2 (colophon, blank)], [4], viii, xc (pp. i–lxv and first frontispiece bound at end of Part VI); 2 photogravure frontispieces and 18 wood-engraved plates by Beardsley (of which 5 double-page, with tissue guards); printed on handmade Van Gelder paper, numerous in-text wood-engraved chapter headings, initials, and borders by Beardsley, printer’s devices to titles and 22 14- and 16-line initials by Beardsley printed in red; variable browning and light spotting to plates with resultant light offsetting to text, else internally very good; an excellent set, housed in two contemporary cloth drop-front boxes (lightly scuffed) with catches and roan spines.

First edition of Beardsley’s groundbreaking illustrations to Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, no. 101 of 300 ‘superior’-issue sets printed on handmade Van Gelder paper, exceptionally well-preserved, largely unopened, and extremely rare in the original wrappers.

‘The Morte d’Arthur is the most famous version and the first in English prose of all the legends which have collected about King Arthur. It is the only true English epic […] The matchless style, the humour, the magnificence, the magic that takes away the breath, combine in a masterpiece of legendary narrative’ (PMM 29). The ‘superior’ issue, larger in size than the ordinary issue, was intended to be bound in three volumes (as opposed to two for the ordinary issue) due to the thickness of the paper, in cream cloth or vellum cases furnished by J.M. Dent, the publisher of this edition. In this issue, the publisher’s devices and twenty-two initials have been printed in red instead of black; the magnificent plates by Beardsley are printed on handmade French etching paper, and the photogravure frontispieces are on India paper.

Beardsley secured the commission from Dent – who intended to rival the publications of Morris’s Kelmscott Press with this lavishly produced edition of Malory’s tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table – through a recommendation from his friend, the photographer and bookseller Frederick H. Evans. Shortly after moving to London, he began frequenting Evans’s bookshop on a daily basis, and soon ‘they were on so friendly a footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in exchange for drawings’ (MacFall, p. 39).

Gertner Zatlin 338–69, 371–675; Reade 56–152; Reade & Dickinson 212–13; Samuels Lasner 22; Vallance 59; See MacFall, Aubrey Beardsley (1927).

SKU: 2124619