The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly.

JAMES, Henry; Kenneth Grahame; Baron Corvo; Hubert Crackanthorpe; John Davidson; Ella D'Arcy; Ada Leverson; H.G. Wells; William Butler Yeats; et al.

Item Number: 144075

London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894-1897.

Complete set of all thirteen volumes of one of the most important periodicals of the 1890s, with contributions by Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Kenneth Grahame, H. G. Wells, and W. B. Yeats, among many others. First edition second issue, without book lists or publisher’s announcements to rear. Octavo, thirteen volumes in the original publisher’s yellow pictorial cloth stamped in black, cover designs by Aubrey Beardsley (Vols. 1-4), Ethel Reed, and Mabel Syrett, tissue-guarded illustrated title page to each volume, extensively illustrated with tissue-guarded plates by artists including Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Laurence Housman, Joseph Pennell, William Rothenstein, and Walter Sickert. In near fine condition. An exceptional set.

The Yellow Book was a leading journal of the British 1890s; to some degree associated with aestheticism and decadence, the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of paintings. Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor, and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its association with illicit French fiction of the period. He obtained works by such artists as Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer. The literary content was no less distinguished; authors who contributed were: Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, "Baron Corvo", Ernest Dowson, George Gissing, Sir Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Richard Le Gallienne, Charlotte Mew, Arthur Symons, H. G. Wells, William Butler Yeats and Frank Swettenham.