Exhibit:

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with Illustrations by EJ Sullivan

Preview of images

Exploring a 1930s edition gift book of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, featuring two verisions of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the poem and illustrations by Edmund J Sullivan. 

Images in this Exhibit

Edition Description

My selected edition is titled Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, authored by Omar Khayyám and translated by Edward FitzGerald. This particular edition holds 193 pages and was published in 1930 by Illustrated Editions Company, a publication company based in New York. This now-defunct publishing house lays claim to somewhere around four Rubáiyát gift book editions, published between the years 1930 and 1939, with the publishing house itself operating from somewhere around 1929 to 1942. 

Of FitzGerald’s translations, this edition pulls from the first and fifth versions, and...
Gift Books and Orientalism

In her article “On Exhibits: Victorians and their Museums,” Barbara J Black argues about the inherent devaluation of gift books, simply through their ability to achieve the status of gift book. She centers her text around the idea that the available number of editions grants the poem status of treasure, which robs the poetry of its intrinsic value. In other words, spreading the perception of the gift book as a “gem connotes the poem’s talismanic value,” as opposed to its value as a poem, and instead becomes just another thing that the West has appropriated for its own gain, becoming...