Books

First edition, one of 200 unnumbered copies. Wilde's poem, together with Charles Ricketts's art nouveau illustrations, was described by W. E. Henley, Wilde's harshest critic, as "about as fin-de-Siècle a business as you ever saw" (Frankel, p. 155). Wilde first met Ricketts in 1889, and in the two years that followed the artist designed either parts or the entirety of several of Wilde's works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Poems (1892), Intentions (1891), and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891). While predominantly working with book illustration and design, Ricketts was also famed for his theatre designs and costumes, and he contributed to the first English production of Wilde's Salomé in 1906. As recorded by James G. Nelson, alongside the 200 copies published in the limited edition, a further 103 copies were printed, though most of these were left unbound. Small quarto. Original full vellum, pictorial decorations by Ricketts to spine and covers in gilt, all edges untrimmed, printed throughout in black, green, and red. Housed in a dark green quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. Title page design, one half-page illustration and eight full-page illustrations by Charles Ricketts. Boards very slightly bowed, as often, some natural variation to vellum on rear cover. A fine copy. Mason 361; Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books, 2003; James G. Nelson, A Checklist of Early Bodley Head Books: 1889-1894, 1999.

The Sphinx is a one-act play written by Oscar Wilde. It's a dramatic monologue by a woman who laments the absence of her lover, who has died. The richness of the symbolic imagery intertwines themes of love with the mystery of the Sphinx.