Exhibit:

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Pocket Book Edition)

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The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Pocket Book Edition) Published 1941

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Book Description
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This edition of the Rubàiyàt of Omar Khayyàm contains both the first and fifth translations by Edward FitzGerald. It was published by Pocket Books, Inc., a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster established in 1939 with the mission of producing cheap mass-market paperbacks for a broad readership. This 1941 edition embodies that ethos: it is printed on pulp paper, its edges are dyed red, and its binding is glued rather than sewn. The book comprises a total of 175 pages, though the final two pages feature advertisements for other Pocket Books titles, highlighting its place in a...
Gift Books and Orientalism
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Edward Said stated in his introduction to Orientalism, “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (2). In this tradition, the East is not simply a geographic region but a constructed category through which the West defines itself as rational, modern, and superior. Barbara Black takes up this frame in her examination of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums; she argues that the book is an Orientalist artifact through...
Image and Text Close Reading
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In Quatrain 10 of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the stanza stages a fantasy of escape from hierarchy in a verdant haven beyond the desert. However, the accompanying image by Gordon Ross operates within a racist and Orientalist framework, depicting the Middle East as backward, barbaric, and brutal. In doing so, the image undermines the stanza’s utopian vision it seeks to produce, ultimately reinforcing systems of hierarchy and segregation rather than imagining their dissolution.

The language of Quatrain X imagines a thin, fragile paradise where the rigid hierarchies of...
How This Edition Was Made
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In 1941, Pocket Books Inc. released a mass-market paperback edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, bringing Edward FitzGerald’s Victorian translation of the Persian quatrains into the hands of a broader American readership. While FitzGerald’s poetic renderings had enjoyed a long-standing popularity among the literary elite, this edition reflected a cultural shift: the democratization of literature in the early 20th century.

To understand just how significant the price of a book was in the early 1940s, consider this: in 1939, a gallon of gasoline cost 19 cents (U.S....
Archival Speculation: Letter to a Little Artist

My Dearest Little Artist,

I hope this package finds you, unharmed from the grasping hands of your greedy younger brother--I do not mean to scorn him, but the manner in which your mother has decided to raise that child, that is to say completely devoid of correction and guidance, leaves me little faith in the future of the opposite sex. Alas, I digress.

I imagine you tucked away in your midwestern fields--green and humming with life sprung from dull roots out of the cruel april rain. I imagine this parcel finds you with pencil in hand, sketching wildflowers, or perhaps the...