124 MALORY, Sir Thomas. The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur, of his Noble Knights of the Round Table . . . The text as imprinted by William Caxton at Westminster the Year mcccclxxxv and now spelled in modern style . . . Westminster: J. M. Dent, 1893–94 ONE OF 300 DELUXE COPIES First Beardsley edition, out-of-series from 300 deluxe copies on Dutch handmade paper, from a total edition of 1,800. The book was published in 12 parts in wrappers, with the purchaser given the choice of sending it back to the publisher, who bound them in vellum or cloth, or to a binder of their own. The 20-year-old Beardsley had been asked to illustrate the work in 1892 by Dent, who hoped to emulate the books of the Kelmscott Press; it took him 18 months to complete the task. “In Le Morte d’Arthur Beardsley learnt his job, but the result is no bungling student’s work . . . If he had never illustrated another book, this edition of Morte d’Arthur could stand as a monument of decorative book illustration” (Lewis, pp. 148–9). “Aubrey Beardsley’s Morte Darthur was one of the most original and certainly one of the most controversial of the nineteenth-century artistic reinterpretations of Malory [which] established Beardsley as the voice of the 1890s . . . Often shockingly overt in their sexuality and eroticism, the illustrations rejected the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites who were Beardsley’s original mentors and offered a revisionist and parodic treatment of their medievalism. Ultimately, Beardsley went far beyond his original intention to ‘flabbergast the bourgeois’ of his day; he also challenged generations of readers and artists to view Arthurian society through his own modernist lens” (Tepa Lupack, ch. 4). 3 volumes (243 × 188 mm). Contemporary half vellum, red calf spine labels, foliate gilt rulings to spine ends, brown morocco-grain cloth sides, marbled edges and endpapers. Photogravure frontispieces on India paper to vols. I and III, 18 full-page wood engravings with tissue guards (5 double-page), numerous text illustrations and approximately 350 designs for chapter headings and borders (foliate and historiated) all by Aubrey Beardsley printed in red and black. Light soiling to vellum, slight bumps to tips, top edge of book block dust toned, sporadic faint foxing, occasional offsetting from full- page engravings and toning to their edges, a very good set. ¶ Lasner 22. John Lewis, The Twentieth Century Book, 1984; Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 , 1976; Tepa Lupack, Barbara Illustrating Camelot , 2008. £6,000 [150549]
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