Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.: Rendered into English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald with an Accompaniment of Drawings by Elihu Vedder.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press,, 1884. The finest American Rubáiyát Signed limited edition, number 47 of 100 copies signed by the illustrator, printed on japon, and bound in full morocco; an unsigned trade issue bound in cloth was also released. Vedder's Rubáiyát is widely esteemed as the finest American edition of the poem ever to be published. "When Houghton Mifflin commissioned Elihu Vedder to illustrate The Rubáiyát, they employed an artist with a rich sense of classical interpretation. Vedder spent 11 months in Rome fulfilling the commission, producing monochrome illustrations in a Greco-Roman style, which caused the London journal Athenaeum to describe Vedder as the latest follower of Michelangelo. Nonetheless, the Grove Art Online encyclopaedia comments on the Vedder drawings as 'some of the earliest examples of Art Nouveau in America'... Houghton Mifflin reissued the Vedder Rubáiyát in different formats in 1886. New editions and reprints continued into the 1920s" (Martin & Mason, The Art of Omar Khayyam: Illustrating Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, 2007). With an excellent provenance: from the library of the pioneering Rubáiyát collector Herman M. Schroeter of Los Angeles, with his "Omariana" bookplate facing the limitation page. Schroeter began a bibliography of the Rubáiyát but abandoned his intention to publish in 1914 when Ambrose George Potter, who had corresponded with him for six years, took up the project. Potter notes in his foreword that Schroeter "generously presented me with the manuscript material he had prepared". Potter's bibliography remains the standard work, still universally consulted by collectors of the Rubáiyát. Folio. Original black morocco by the Riverside Press, spine and front cover lettered and decorated in gilt to a design by Vedder, gilt turn-ins, silk doublures and endpapers, gilt edges. Illustrations throughout by Vedder, printed on one side of the leaf only, using the Albertype process. Light wear and rubbing at extremities but much less than often, rubbing skilfully retouched, slight fraying around silk endpaper extremities, light running dampstain at right bottom corner else contents clean. A very good copy. Potter 201.