[FINE BINDING] Rubaiyat of Omar Khayaam the Astronomer-Poet of Persia rendered into English verse.
London: Macmillan and Co., 1903. Tan cuir repoussé signed by Cedric Chivers of Bath on the rear turn-in, the covers with a design after H. Granville Fell [unsigned], the front cover with a young woman pouring wine from a jug, against an Art Nouveau background, the rear with a book and a tree of life surmounted by a singing bird, both designs delicately hand-tinted and heightened with gilt tooling, the whole protected in the original felt-lined case. 8 x 5 1/2 inches (20 x 14 cm); 112 pp. Minute wear, a tiny wormhole on the rear joint with a resultant trifling defect to the rear endpaper and final blank, but overall in exceptionally pretty condition.

While best known for their underpainted vellum bindings (for a specimen painted to the same design as the present see the present catalogue), Chivers had several other patented techniques for the preparation of decorative bindings. We have seen other examples utilizing the present method by the firm, but they are much rarer than their work bound in transparent vellum, and are, if anything, more striking, close to the technical level of the French practitioners of the modelled leather style of binding. The illustrator H. Granville Fell did many superb Art Nouveau designs for the bindery; another version of the present may be seen in Maggs catalogue 1212, lot 291 (and in the present Doyle catalogue).

C The Collection of Jay I. Kislak sold to benefit the Kislak Family Foundation

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