Exhibit:

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia

Preview of images

Gold Blocked Binding Elihu Vedder's dedication to his wife. Illustrations Quatrains 1-3 Illustrations Quatrains 17 &18 Handwritten Annotation: Florence Fernald, 1897
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Gallery Exhibit of the 1894 edition of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia

Images in this Exhibit

Description of My Edition
Gold Blocked Binding Elihu Vedder's dedication to his wife. Illustrations Quatrains 1-3 Illustrations Quatrains 17 &18 Handwritten Annotation: Florence Fernald, 1897

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, which was rendered in English verse by Edward FitzGerald, is interesting due to the detailed black and white illustrations by Elihu Vedder. This edition was published in 1894 under one of the more prominent publishers, Houghton Mifflin and Company. It was also published under FitzGerald’s 3rd edition of his translation. The edition has many attributes that make it stand out as a collectible variant of the Rubaiyat with its gold blocked binding on the front, dedication from Elihu Vedder to his wife, vast notes with ornamental...
Gift Books and Orientalism
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In On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums, Barbara Black explores the impact of Victorian imperialism on the translation by Edward FitzGerald of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. She acknowledges the imperialist power of empire that the West orchestrated, suggesting that some gift books have appropriated the poem “by de-emphasizing its otherness and focusing instead on the familiarity…of FitzGerald’s translation,” (Black 61). One way in which the West did this was by creating the importance of owning an edition of the poem just as much as, if not more than, reading the...
Close Reading of Image + Text

On the page with stanzas 13-16 in Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, we get a detailed illustration by Elihu Vedder of a woman amongst a rose bush and vines, a skull, and a broken part of some statue-like sculpture. When examining this illustration, we can see how it works together with stanza 14 to contribute to the overarching theme of nature in the book as a whole.

The first line of stanza 14 states, “look to the blowing Rose about us–Lo.” This line works in tandem with the images of the roses beside the women in the illustration. The roses border...