VAN MAANEN, W[illem] (compiler). Noordhoff’s Select Series Nr. 3 … Stories and Poems from the Yellow Book.

Dutch Decadence

VAN MAANEN, W[illem] (compiler). Noordhoff’s Select Series Nr. 3 … Stories and Poems from the Yellow Book. Groningen: P. Noordhoff. 1926.

8vo. Publisher’s beige buckram, upper board illustrated in yellow and black after Aubrey Beardsley, spine and upper board lettered in black, brown endpapers; pp. [iii], [1 (blank)], 160; with 5 black-and-white plates (the last in colour); boards lightly rubbed, hinges worn; very light foxing to first and final leaves; a very good copy.

First edition thus, very rare, of this anthology of stories from The Yellow Book, produced by the largest educational publishing house in the Netherlands, with illustrations and a cover design by Beardsley.

Willem van Maanen, general editor of Noordhoff’s Select Series alongside W. van Doorn, had revised the sixth edition of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband for the Stories and Sketches (1932) and edited a 1937 compilation of works by Wilde, Stevenson, and Gissing. The Noordhoff firm, extant to this day, was established in Groningen by Popko Noordhoff in 1858 and later merged with J.B. Wolters’s educational publishing house. The plates depict Beardsley’s Portrait of Himself, his cover design for vol. IV of The Yellow Book, his title-page design for vol. III of The Yellow Book, and Ave atque valev (Catullus, Carmen CI), as well as a colour illustration of Max Beerbohm’s The Yellow Dwarf. The Beardsley drawings are adapted from The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley (John Lane, 1920). There are also biographical notes on the author of each selected contributor to The Yellow Book.

OCLC finds copies in the Netherlands only.

Not in Samuels Lasner. See Studia Germanica Gandensia 8 (1966), p. 170n.~i~

SKU: 2126086