The Yellow Book. An Illustrated Quarterly.

London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894-1897.. FIRST EDITION. 13 volumes (complete, all published). 8vo. (21 x 16 cm). Original yellow cloth with decorations by Beardsley stamped in black on covers and spines, leaves largely unopened, bound without the advertisements sometimes found at the end of the volumes. Profusely illustrated throughout by Beardsley, Walter Crane, Laurence Housman and others. Edited by Henry Harland. Occasional minor spotting to contents, generally a particularly clean and handsome set. The Yellow Book was founded in 1894 by Beardsley and his friend Henry Harland, both keen on establishing an avant-garde organ that would capture the decadent and aesthetic principals of the fin-de-si�cle. The yellow cloth covers, embellished by Beardsley's striking flat-perspective designs, are a nod to the yellow covers of salacious French and European novels, like the one which Dorian Gray reads and by which he is corrupted. The literary contributors included Henry James, Max Beerbohm, George Gissing, Edmund Gosse, Kenneth Graham, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons, H.G. Wells and W.B. Yeats. The illustrators included Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, R Anning Bell, Laurence Housman, Sir Frederick Leighton, Joseph Pennell, Charles Robinson, Walter Sickert and William Strang.