A binding by Charles Ricketts for Oscar Wilde’s ‘The House of Pomegranates’

Binding for Wilde’s “House of Pomegranates”

Charles Ricketts

1891

Cloth binding with gilt overlays

8½ x 7 inches

[See commentary below, and click on image to enlarge it.]

Photograph and text by Simon Cooke

Reproduced by kind permission of an anonymous collector [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link to this URL in a web document or cite it in a print one.]

This curious design attempts to provide a tonal equivalent to Wilde’s super-refined fairy-tales. Though admired (and defended) by the author, it seems to modern eyes rather clumsy and laboured; it is certainly the least characteristic of Ricketts’s casings, and he never again attempt to deploy this sort of figurative imagery. The binding’s aesthetic effects have been compromised by time, however; the cloth and gilt have invariably faded, and few copies survive in the sort of condition that would allow us to recover a sense of its original, rather over-stated, impact. The copy shown here typifies the distressed state of books surviving into twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Wilde, Oscar. The House of Pomegranates. London: Osgood McIlvaine, 1891.

Created 18 August 2018