Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam illustrated by Charles Robinson

William Collins and Sons was a London- and Glasgow-based company. By 1920, it held a dominant position in several book publishing market segments, including Bibles, religious texts, and mass-market reprints. Their commission with Agatha Christie, who excelled in crime and mystery, helped them to take a dominant position in the fiction market, too.

Their holiday gift program was one of the major economic drivers. At least six months before the most financially intensive last quarter of the year, Collins planned well in advance and offered their titles for the holidays at the book fairs. Because booksellers had already pre-ordered books from the spring and summer exhibitions, Collins was able to make a very accurate sales prediction. This led to timely orders for paper, printing, and binding. Of course, they had also upgraded most of the standard cloth editions to high-end leather versions, using better paper quality for books intended as gifts. This strategy helped them to optimize capacity, survive the traditionally slow months like January and February, and invest in new works by unknown authors with potential, but also risk.

Charles Robinson's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a 1928 project. The craze for Omar Khayyam was already fading. New art movements replaced the Art Nouveau style. The expectations were very likely not extremely high. That is probably evidenced by only four full-color plates that were commissioned from the artist. Still, they executed the book as a proper gift edition should be. They offered it in three different colors of leather (typically the so-called morocco with a slightly pebbled texture):

- royal blue was the most numerous,

- crimson red was used for variations of the book printed in red ink,

- green was the scarcer.

 

All versions came with gold-gilded page edges and gold-stamped cover vignettes, which also varied. There are no records of the exact number of specimens sold by color, or of the total number sold. This already makes life of the bibliophile very interesting, if not frustrating.

 

 

In addition, Collins also published significantly smaller so-called pocket leather (in at least free colors, of course) variants, designed as old-fashioned romantic diaries. But things really start to complicate if we know that numerous collectors preferred to buy the book pages unbound directly from the printer and hired one of the dedicated book-binders to create a completely unique gift book with additional decorations. For the final touch, there was also a protective box. Collins was a pioneer of decorative dust jackets, which were designed to make their books stand out on shelves. However, the box was typically the first victim of external influences. An original copy with a well-preserved protective box is rare and can sell for up to several thousand dollars.

If you enjoy Omar Khayyam and Art Nouveau illustrationsby Charles Robinson, we can direct you to two other artists who illustrated the same title in different conditions:

Gilbert Penrose James' color edition of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat was the highlight of his career.

Edmund Dulac's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the most collectible versions of this title.

We hope you enjoyed the article. Share its beautiful illustrations with other art lovers and keep the spark of Omar Khayyam alive.