O'SULLIVAN, Vincent. The Houses of Sin.

'One of Beardsley's Most Daring and Most Successful Covers'

O'SULLIVAN, Vincent. The Houses of Sin. London: Leonard Smithers. 1897.

Tall 8vo. Publisher’s boards in imitation of vellum, both boards lettered in gilt and decorated in gilt after a design by Aubrey Beardsley, endpapers with Van Gelder Zonen watermark; pp. 65, [1]; spine ends and corners bumped, slight soiling to boards; some offsetting to endpapers; a very good copy.

First edition, no. 145 of 400 copies, of these poems by the American-born poet Vincent O’Sullivan, a friend of Oscar Wilde, the binding featuring Beardsley’s provocative ‘pig and pillar’ design.

In a letter to Smithers, Beardsley described his initial drawing as ‘very pretty! I think you will like it’. Beardsley had originally proposed a binding of gilt purple or black cloth; although these plans did not come to fruition, the design of the binding was influenced by Oscar Wilde, who told O’Sullivan (recounted in the latter’s 1936 Aspects of Wilde) that ‘nothing looks more vulgar and cheap than a book with an ornament on one side of the cover and the other side blank’.

Indeed, the ‘column bearing the book’s title and a winged, cherublike pig (clearly female) addressing what Reade describes as the “impressive growth of the column”’ is gilt to both boards (Nelson, p. 159). ‘The decentered design has been termed “one of Beardsley’s most daring and and most successful covers”’ (ibid.). Beardsley had also produced the frontispiece to O’Sullivan’s A Book of Bargains in 1896.

Gertner Zatlin 1074; Samuels Lasner 120. See Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents (2010).

SKU: 2124722