Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. by FISH, Anne Harriet (illus.); FITZGERALD, Edward - 1922: Rendered into English verse... With decorations by Fish.

New York: E. P. Dutton & Company,, 1922. A Jazz Age Rubáiyát First US edition of the Annie Fish Rubáiyát, the UK edition was published the same year; copies with the dust jacket are decidedly scarce. Anne Harriet Fish (1890-1964) was one of the wittiest and most trenchant cartoonist-illustrators of the 1920s. She studied under John Hassall, at the London School of Art and in Paris. Her greatest vogue was in the 20s and 30s when she was a staple of Tatler, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar and American Vanity Fair, where she most notably illustrated advice on social climbing by Dorothy Parker. The Dutch illustrator and writer Cornelis Veth considered her "one of the most important social satirists of the day. He wrote that she depicted modern society with modern boldness... Today her economical and polished designs come across as amusingly sharp, satirical commentaries on the flapper lifestyle" (cited in Peppin & Mickelthwait). This is a transmuted here into a captivating Jazz Age Rubáiyát, "a sumptuous edition" (ODNB), superbly printed at the Curwen Press, the plates, printed by the specialist colour printers George Gibbons and Co., of Leicester, capturing faithfully Fish's incisive line and displaying a fine depth of colour. Quarto. Original black quarter cloth, spine lettered and blocked in gilt, patterned paper sides, orange decorative endpapers, top edge trimmed, others untrimmed. With dust jacket. Frontispiece, 18 tissue-guarded plates and half-title design by Fish, printed in gold and colours, title page and decorative initials printed in orange and black. Jacket spine slightly toned and chipped at extremities, repaired short closed-tear at head of front panel, slight bumping to spine ends of binding, small white mark to top edge, a few very minor finger-soiling marks. A particularly nice copy in the dust jacket. Houfe, The Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, p. 136; Peppin & Micklethwait, Dictionary of British Book Illustrators: The Twentieth Century, pp. 101-02; Potter, Bibliography of the Rubáiyát, 118.