SPARE, Austin O. Earth Inferno. London: Co-operative Printing Society. February 1905.
Folio (448 x 354 mm). Brown printed wrappers, secured with string tie at spine and lettered in black to front wrapper, in card folder; pp. 30, with 12 full-page illustrations, ornaments, and vignettes from line blocks designed by the author; covers with small chips to edges (as usual), string tie renewed; occasional light spotting, edges of wrapper and spine reinforced with archival tape, but generally very good.
First limited edition, number 59 of 265 copies signed by the author, of this striking work of esoteric mysticism and grotesque.
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was an English artist and occultist. At the age of seventeen, he produced Earth Inferno, his first book, as a reaction to the public attention he garnered after becoming the youngest artist featured in the Royal Academy’s 1904 summer exhibition. ‘A serious and autodidactic youth, he told a Daily Chronicle journalist that he was inventing his own religion’ (ODNB). Although Spare attracted patrons as an illustrator and bookplate designer, he was regarded as an enfant terrible at the Royal College of Art, where he befriended feminist activist Sylvia Pankhurst before leaving in 1905, without completing his studies.
Earth Inferno features poems and aphorisms in an aesthetic style heavily influenced by the artist Charles Ricketts (1866-1931), one of Spare’s early supporters. Each pair of pages presents a large woodcut illustration by Spare, alongside a commentary. In addition to excerpts from Dante’s Inferno, the book includes passages from Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The line blocks were produced by Arc Engraving Company, Ltd.
A second edition was not printed until 1976.
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