Oscar Wilde: Recollections by Jean Paul Raymond & Charles Ricketts.

WILDE, Oscar.

$500.00

Item Number: 139784

Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press, 1932.

First edition of Ricketts’ recollections of Wilde, published posthumously with a design reminiscent of the Vale Press. “The only Nonesuch book linked in a personal way with the private press movement of those years” (Dreyfus, 81). Royal octavo, original publisher’s cloth decorated in gilt, top edge gilt with others untrimmed. One of 800 numbered copies, this is number 556. Near fine with the majority of the rare original dust jacket laid in.

Wilde’s “theme is not, as is often supposed, art’s divorce from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experience. His creative works almost always end in unmasking. The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger. While the ultimate virtue in Wilde’s essays is in make-believe, the denouement of his dramas and narratives is that masks have to go. We must acknowledge what we are. Wilde at least was keen to do so. Though he offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, his created world contains much pain” (Ellmann, xvi).