A TRUTH IN WILDE’S life, to adapt his famous saying, is one whose contradictory is also true.1 Despite the litany of scarlet sins he committed against books, he cherished and venerated them. He spoke of his golden books with the reverence usually reserved for sacred texts, and he described his library fondly, giving special mention to its ‘collection of presentation volumes from almost every poet of my time . . . its beautifully bound editions of my father’s and mother’s works; its wonderful array of college and school prizes; its éditions de luxe’.2
The presentation volumes Wilde received, from authors such as Whitman and Morris, were evidently among the most treasured items in his collection. They were memorials of acquaintance as well as a testimony to the respect these writers felt for Wilde’s work. The reference to the ‘beautifully bound editions’ of his parents’ works, and to ‘college and school prizes’, also shows the importance of personal association for him.
The editions of Wilde’s own works that stood on his library shelves can, too, be classed as personal mementoes of immense sentimental value. Among these was a unique copy of Intentions, Wilde’s 1891 anthology of dialogues and critical writings, that had been rebound for him as a birthday present by Ada Leverson. Leverson, whom Wilde addressed as ‘The Sphinx’, was the ‘wilful and wonderful’ author of witty journalistic sketches and one of Wilde’s closest and most faithful friends.3 Her gift, among the loveliest books Wilde owned, has a deep green cover, echoing the olive of the original edition. It is decorated with a delicate gilt design of roses and poppies; next to these, also traced in gilt, are the title and Wilde’s initials. Wilde described the present as ‘more green than the original even . . . I read it as a new work, with wonder and joy.’ He was equally effusive about its contents, declaring, with endearing candour, ‘I simply love that book.’4
Wilde adored volumes which had another sort of personal association attached to them: he delighted in books that had been owned, or inscribed, by his literary heroes. He possessed a copy of Tennyson’s poems formerly belonging to Carlyle, and a volume on the classics that hailed from the library of the Irish Nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell.5 Wilde may have coveted books inscribed or annotated by his other heroes. He certainly ‘wondered’ at the sight of a rare book which belonged to an acquaintance – a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy ‘in which Keats had written . . . marvellous notes on Milton’. Yet, probably due to lack of funds, he did not own any such items himself and had to content himself instead with his unadorned first editions of Keats’s Endymion and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of Saint Agnes, and Other Poems.6*
Wilde was particularly fond of his éditions de luxe – books that were published in rare and luxurious formats. On his shelves there was a host of elegant volumes of French poetry, such as Mimes, written by his friend Marcel Schwob (Wilde’s copy was one of twenty printed on Japanese paper).7 Exquisite volumes of English verse were also on display. John Gray’s Silverpoints was one of the highlights of his collection. Wilde adopted the handsome young man (whom he addressed as ‘Dorian’) as his protégé and lover, and agreed to underwrite his book’s production costs. Yet, in the event, when the pair fell out, another of Gray’s paiderastic patrons paid for its publication. Silverpoints is the apotheosis of aesthetic publishing; Wilde described it as ‘dainty’ – one of the highest terms of praise for a book in the period – and urged the publisher of one of his own books to use it as a model.8
Wilde had an especial passion for two books of poetry in his library: Rossetti’s Poems and the verse drama The Tragic Mary, penned by his friends Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Bradley’s niece), who wrote under the alias Michael Field.9 He lauded the volumes as ‘the two most beautiful books of the century’.10 Wilde also owned countless handsome prose volumes, such as Morris’s Kelmscott Press edition of Meinhold’s Sidonia the Sorceress, in Speranza’s marvellous translation. It is a masterpiece of ravishing binding and type.11
Wilde could not, by the standards of his time, be called an out-and-out bibliomaniac, yet he was a member of a particular order of that society – that of the dandies of books. Book dandies can be distinguished from conventional bibliophiles by their interest in the book as a harmonious aesthetic object. They regarded volumes as delicious symphonies of text, illustration and binding; their Holy Grail was a book in which these elements formed a perfect unity. To them, books were beautiful works of art in themselves, rather than mere repositories of the text.
Wilde always emphasised the importance of literary style over a work’s subject or meaning, so it was natural for him to extend his interest to the decorative details of the book itself. His passion for ‘the book beautiful’ is of a piece with his conviction that, in art, form and content should be one and indivisible; it is consistent, too, with the immense value he placed on appearances. ‘It is only shallow people,’ he wrote, ‘who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’12
Wilde invariably judged a book by its cover. ‘The public,’ he said, ‘is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public.’13 A volume’s format and type were also of paramount importance: ‘I do not approve of the shape of the Pseudonym Library,’ he remarked of a series of miniature duodecimo sized large-print volumes. ‘It is unjust to a good style to print it on a tiny page. Imagine turning Pater over rapidly. It is violence.’14 In his book reviews Wilde was equally fastidious. When covering a batch of books he sometimes made a point of discussing the most beautiful volume first and he frequently urged publishers to produce ‘decorative ornament that will go with type and printing, and give to each page a harmony and unity of effect’.15
The most eloquent testimonies to Wilde’s obsession with the ‘apparel of books’16 are the first editions of his own works, in which he attempted to embody his ideal of ‘the book beautiful’. He offered criticisms and suggestions to his publishers at every stage of a book’s production, advising them on the cover (‘I always began [a work] with the cover,’ he remarked)17 as well as on the binding, paper and type. ‘The type,’ he wrote to the publisher of one of his volumes, ‘seems crisp and clean. I suppose it is as black as one can get? Perhaps a shade thicker would be well.’18 Wilde became incensed when publishers failed to follow his instructions or to meet his high standards: ‘Why, oh! why,’ he wrote to the publisher of the American edition of The Happy Prince, ‘did you not keep to my large margin [i.e. that of the English edition] – I assure you that there are subtle scientific relations between margin and style, and my stories read quite differently in your edition.’19
Wilde’s strenuous efforts paid dividends. His first editions are gorgeous material objects and landmarks in the late Victorian revival of printing. The first edition of Dorian Gray, designed by Charles Ricketts, is a particularly elegant volume. Golden marigolds are scattered across a cover the colour of cigarette ash; the title and author’s name are engraved in gilt on the ivory white spine. In its beguiling beauty it reminds us of one of the seductive and poisonous books mentioned in the novel itself – perhaps a deliberate ploy on Wilde’s part to blur the distinction between the worlds of fact and fiction.
The first edition of A House of Pomegranates (1891), again designed by Ricketts, has an opulent cover adorned with fanciful gilt shapes. Wilde was fond of these purely decorative figures which found no ‘imitative parallel . . . in that chaos that is termed nature’.20 The most exquisite of all Wilde’s first editions is that of The Sphinx which is bound in vellum and gold from a design by Ricketts. That artist, who illustrated and decorated the book throughout, chose the revolutionary three-colour type of black, green and red for the text. The book is so beautiful that, read in any other format, the poem seems to lose half of its power. It was issued in an ordinary edition of two hundred copies, and a limited large paper edition of just twenty-five.21
Wilde endeavoured to make his name synonymous in the public mind with exquisite books. In 1882, at the very outset of his literary career, he was photographed twice with a luxurious limited edition copy of his Poems in his hand (see p. 114). Printed on Dutch hand-made paper, the volume was bound in vellum; its cover has a gilt design that the author himself traced from a Chinese jar.22
Wilde attempted to project the image of himself as a dandy of books through his writings. They contain many long and loving descriptions of delicate and delightful volumes. Dorian Gray has no fewer than ‘nine large-paper copies of the first edition’ of his favourite novel, ‘bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods’.23 Wilde’s hero also takes pleasure in ‘an elaborately illustrated edition of Manon Lescaut’.24
Dorian is not the only dandified bibliomane to appear in Wilde’s writings. The ‘subtle connoisseur’ Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was, Wilde tells us, a lover of ‘bookbindings, and early editions, and wide-margined proofs’.25 In the dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ Gilbert boasts of owning a copy of Baudelaire’s verse collection Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] that is ‘bound in . . . Nile-green skin . . . powdered with gilded nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory’.26
Although Wilde was an authentic dandy of books, he was also that rare thing – a dandy with a sense of humour. In this respect he differed from that archetypal fictional biblio-dandy of the period, Duc Jean Des Esseintes. The fantastically fastidious duke, the hero of J-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours [Against Nature], has his favourite titles printed to his own bizarre specifications and he handles his books with the solemn reverence of an altar boy carrying the accoutrements of the mass.
Wilde laughed at the fussiness and excessive refinement of his own attitude to books. He enjoyed the joke of a friend who, knowing his fondness for wide margins, advised him to publish a volume that was all margin. He also parodied his own love of limited editions by declaring his intention to bring out The Sphinx in an edition of just three copies: ‘one for myself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven. I have some doubts,’ he added, ‘about the British Museum’.27
* Wilde owned numerous editions of Keats’s writings, and multiple copies of the same works by other favourite authors such as Shakespeare and Poe. He probably used one edition as his ‘reading’ or ‘working’ copy, while cherishing the more valuable volume as a sumptuous material object or as a holy relic of its creator.