This attractive book is titled "Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer-Poet Of Persia", Rendered Into English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald, With An Accompaniment Of Drawings by Elihu Vedder and published in Boston By Houghton Mifflin in 1894. The book has a gray binding with black and gilt borders and gilt lettering on the spine, black and gilt borders with gilt decorations on the front cover reminiscent of Art Nouveau and Van Gogh's "Starry Night", the title and Eliihu Vedder's name in black and gilt rectangles on the cover, bevelled edges, decorative endpapers, an illustrated frontis with Greco-Roman figures and a poem, then the title page, a page saying the book was printed at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, a dedication page, unpaginated French fold illustrations and some uncut numbered pages of text, and the top edge is gilt. (French folds are uncut on the sides - at the fore-edge - rather than at the top.) Fitzgerald translated the book from Persian to English in 1859 and the title came from a selection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131), who was dubbed "the Astronomer Poet of Persia"; quatrains are a form of poetry called "rub??iy?t" in Persian. Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularized by Whitley Stokes, and from 1861 onward, the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880's, the book was so popular throughout the English-speaking world that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle" cult of the Rubaiyat - an end of the century or turn of the century cult. FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translations in English, Hindi and many other languages. Elihu Vedder (1836 - 1923) was an American symbolist painter, book illustrator, and poet, born in New York City. He is best known for his illustrations for Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat (the deluxe edition, published by Houghton Mifflin). He trained in Paris and Italy, then returned to the United States during the American Civil War and made a small living doing commercial illustrations, and became friends with Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. After the financial success of his 1884 Rubaiyat, Elihu bought a home in Rome and on the Isle of Capri, where other artists and aesthetes would hang out. He visited England many times and was influenced by the work of English and Irish mystics such as William Blake and Willam Butler Yeats, and you can see the influence of Blake in the illustrations here. The authenticity of the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam is uncertain. Khayyam was a real person and famous during his lifetime not as a poet, but as an astronomer and mathematician, and the earliest reference to his writing poetry is found in his biography by al-Isfahani, written 43 years after the death of Omar Khayyam. The elephant folio with Vedder's illustrations came out in 1884, the quarto edition came out in 1886, this is the first printing of the octavo edition, and the original drawings by Vedder are now housed at the Smithsonian. The book is 8vo. and measures 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages and illustrations, light bumps on the heel and crown of the spine and a tad of rubbing at the tips, and a very attractive copy of this famous work by Fitzgerald, with the added bonus of the Vedder illustrations. A copy of the Rubaiyat was decked out with jewels by Sangorski and Sutcliffe and went down with the Titanic. Sangorski & Sutcliffe is a firm of bookbinders established in London in 1901, famous for its luxurious jeweled bindings that used real gold and precious stones on their book covers: they were commissioned to create a binding for the Rubaiyat, the front cover was adorned with three golden peacocks with jeweled tails and surrounded by heavily tooled and gilded vines, it was sent across the ocean on the ill-fated Titanic in 1912, and the book, known as the Great Omar, sank with the ship and has never been recovered. Can you imagine what that would have been worth now? Copies of the 1884 edition go from $600 to $17,000 and this is a chance to buy an attractive copy from 1894 at a much lower price, and a great gift for someone. It should only be the copy from the Titanic. #87 #1674