BOOK: Aldus Manutius, "Humanism and the Latin Classics"

Aldus Manutius: Humanism and the Latin Classics. Edited and translated by John N. Grant. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 78. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674971639. xxxi + 414 pp.

This is a sequel or companion volume to the previous book of Aldus's prefaces, which I posted about a few months ago. This one includes his prefaces to books in Latin as opposed to Greek; most were works of ancient Roman authors, but there were a few books by Aldus's humanist contemporaries. Overall my impression is similar as with the previous volume: mostly nothing here is terribly exciting by itself (but then, it would be unreasonable to expect a publisher's prefaces to make for exciting reading), but there are enough interesting random tidbits here and there to make the book an enjoyable read, especially in moderate doses.

The translator's introduction is very interesting and gives us more details about Aldus's life and work than I remember from the previous volume. I was surprised to learn that he only owned a 10% share of his publishing business; two other people owned the rest (p. xii). There are also some interesting remarks about how much more expensive and time-consuming it was to print books in Greek than in Latin, partly due to all the ligatures and the like, partly because compositors made more mistakes and proofreading took more time; and besides, the market for them was smaller (p. xiii–iv). One rival even tried to cut costs by printing everything in uppercase! (P. xiii.)

I also liked the discussion of Aldus's marketing efforts (p. xvii); he issued catalogues, wrote prefaces that partly functioned as advertisements, and introduced his famous logo (pp. xix–xx) to promote his brand name. His books are still famous for their design, but the quality of the texts themselves “was a hit-or-miss affair” (p. xxiii). Well, he certainly likes to complain that his rivals' books are full of errors (pp. 161, 207).

One of his most famous innovations was publishing more things in a smaller format, which I think is mentioned more in this volume than it was in the previous one. (p. xiv–v). His word for a book in this format was “enchiridium”, i.e. something that can be held in the hand; I guess it's from the same Greek word that gave us chiromancy for palm-reading. Previously this format was mostly used for some religious books so people could carry them to church etc., but Aldus's innovation was to publish classical authors in this format (n. 27 on p. 325). See also n. 125 on p. 338. He also argued that his font added to the convenience of the format (n. 160, p. 341). He says that he got the idea of the pocket-book format from the manuscript library of Bernardo Bembo, father of the better-known Pietro (p. 163) There's a letter from a Hungarian prelate, Sigismund Thurzó, praising the format: “certain books which were of pocket-book size and which because of their convenience gave me marvelous pleasure. [. . .] had a much better text and were printed in a much more beautiful font” etc.(p. 243).

Another topic that appears several times here but that I don't remember from the previous volume are Aldus's complaints about his employees. “Unrest among Aldus' employees was not uncommon” (note 16, p. 324). He complaints about “the hostility of scoundrels and members of my household, and the plotting of workers who were no better than damnable runaway slaves” (p. 11). “I have also been the victim of four conspiracies of my labores and workmen in my publishing house, led by Avarice, the mother of all evils.” (P. 245) :))

Some of these conspiracies apparently involved publishing pirated imitations of Aldus's books in Lyons, resulting in hilarious complaints about those smelly Frenchmen: “the paper in their books is of an inferior quality and is somewhat malodorous while the font, if one looks carefully at it, smacks of a certain ‘Frenchness,’ so to speak, and the capitals are quite ugly.” :))) (P. 247.)

Some of his books contained both a Greek text and its translation in Latin, but instead of simply printing them on facing pages, he had a strange and complicated system of printing some quires all in Greek and some all in Latin, then included instructions to the reader on how to bind them into something halfway decent (p. 15; but it was still a mess). Apparently the idea was that readers who were good enough at Greek could, if they wanted, just bind the Greek quires and throw the Latin ones away. There's even an appendix by the translator to clarify his instructions; I was relieved to learn that this practice was abandoned after his death (p. 311).

I was impressed by his efforts to obtain new manuscripts of works that he hadn't printed yet; we find him communicating with Poles, Hungarians, and occasionally his efforts extend “as far as Romania” (p. 41), though some of this may be an exaggeration (note 3 on p. 322).

In my post about the previous volume I mentioned his term “buriers of books” (bibliotaphs) for those who held onto their manuscripts and refused to make them available for printing. He uses the word again here (p. 47), but a note by the translator (n. 106, p. 337) says that the term had actually been coined by Michael Apostolis.

In some instances, Aldus's printed editions preserved works that would otherwise be lost, i.e. the manuscripts he worked with are no longer extant (e.g. the work of Julius Obsequens, n. 200, p. 346).

In one of his prefaces, Aldus quotes from Ovid's Fasti: “The earth is like a ball, propped up by no support,/ its great weight hanging in the suspended air” (p. 61). It's nice to see that the idea of a spherical earth was already well-known in ancient times.

In another preface, he quotes from Martial: “If you are poor, Aemilianus, you will always be poor. Nowadays only the rich receive money.” (P. 177.) I guess that some things never change...

A curious quote on p. 197: “A long time has taught lions to obey humans, along time has eaten away rocks with gentle water.” The translator's note says it's from Tibullus. What was he smoking? Lions obeying humans? Maybe when you order them to eat people in the arena...

One of his books contains a colour map; “[t]he coloring was done by hand” (n. 248, p. 351). His preface included a legend, and he couldn't resist entering into a discussion of the Greek names of colours and what exactly they meant (pp. 109–10). :)

On one occasion Aldus himself has some misgivings about the long-term effects of the technology of printing: “First of all, we see the kind of artisans into whose hands the sacred monuments of literature have fallen; secondly, we know how certain men with little education dare to explain, comment on and emend every book.” (P. 189.) He is on to something — but oh, if he thinks printing is bad, he can count himself lucky that he did not live to see what we did with blogs and social media :]

Aldus also wrote a textbook on Latin grammar (and published it — so I guess that technically it was self-published :P). It was reasonably succesful, though not as much as some others (p. 365, n. 51). In the preface he criticizes the practice of learning grammar rules by heart, and suggests learning Cicero's writings by heart instead (p. 199). Well, I guess that technically counts as an improvement...

One of the prefaces is dedicated “to the divine Lucrezia Borgia” (p. 217), whom he praises as “having lived the most praiseworthy of lives” and possessing “outstanding virtues” (p. 219). “What can I say of your devotion to God and all the saints, of your generosity toward the poor, of your kindness to your fellow citizens, of your just treatment of anyone?” (P. 221.) I was very surprised by all this, because my impression of Lucrezia Borgia so far has mostly been that her virtues consisted of being pimped out by her father, the pope, to various cardinals and noblemen for political purposes. But then, perhaps I shouldn't be learning my history from gloriously lurid quasi-biographical novels and Assassin's Creed games... :))

There's an interesting letter from one Giovanni Giocondo, describing the work of editing ancient texts from manuscripts and pointing out how much work is involved in this, especially when dealing with numerous and/or corrupt manuscripts (pp. 255–7). This reminded me of a remark I recently read somewhere else: “the worst texts, e.g. that of Propertius, are often so corrupt that in a given place each particular MS has only gibberish. In such a case modern editors can construct a tentative text only because each MS seems to retain different scraps of the truth.”

This book has unusually many misprints: missing hyphens (“nobl|man”, p. xii; “man|script”, p. xxx); “what can me more delightful” on p. 25; a missing full-stop after “lifetime” on p. 73. And a very curious quirk: on p. xix, the ó in the name “Thurzó” looks very unusual — I suspect it's actually a Greek omicron: Thurzό. In Móré on the same page they use a normal-looking ó. I wonder how this happened.

I learned an interesting new word on p. 277: “supposititious”. At first I thought it was a misprint, but it seems to be a real word, and apparently means the same thing as the more normal-looking suppositious.

ToRead:

• Note 12 on p. xxviii mentions a book titled Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script and Type (1992) — sounds interesting.
• N. G. Wilson: From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (1992). Mentioned here on p. 321.

BOOK: Aldus Manutius, "The Greek Classics"

Aldus Manutius: The Greek Classics. Edited and translated by N. G. Wilson. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 70. Harvard University Press, 2016. 9780674088672. xvii + 395 pp.

Aldus Manutius was a famous printer who was active in Venice in the late 15th and early 16th century. I probably first heard of him indirectly because a company named after him were the makers of one of the early desktop publishing programs, Aldus PageMaker. Anyway, the original Aldus published the first printed editions of numerous works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as some contemporary works.

Many of these books included a short preface by Aldus himself, and the present volume includes about 50 of these prefaces from his editions of Greek authors. In 2017 they also published a similar volume containing his prefaces to books by Latin authors, and according to a note by Prof. Hankins (p. ix in the present volume), they are also planning a similar book with prefaces by Sweynheym and Pannartz, the German printers who had been the first to bring printing technology to Italy.

I found Aldus's prefaces to be more interesting than I had expected. For Aldus — like for many publishers, especially before that whole industry had been consolidated into a handful of gigantic faceless media conglomerates in the late 20th century — publishing was not just a business and a way to make money. He had had a humanist education and had worked as a tutor before going into the printing business (p. xiv), and throughout his prefaces you can see how keenly aware he was of the fact that he and his fellow humanists were involved in a grand effort to revive and restore the study of classical languages and literature. Aldus's publishing of Greek works, many of which had previously been extant in manuscript form only and had not been widely available, was an important part of that and he approached it with tremendous enthusiasm.

It was a huge project, and in his prefaces Aldus often comes across as an extraordinarily busy man who dedicates all his waking hours to furiously collecting, editing and printing yet more of his beloved classical authors (p. 215). He compares his labours to those of Hecules (p. 53) and Sisyphus (pp. 241, 257). He often emphasizes how he is doing this for the benefit of his readers, people who wish to learn the Greek language and then profit from the study of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, etc. (pp. 45, 47). As the translator's introduction points out (p. xiii), in Aldus's time there was still a great shortage of textbooks and the like from which one could learn Greek (which I guess is why the presence of native speakers of Greek who had fled from the collapsing Byzantine Empire gave such a boost to the study of Greek in Italy); several of his books were specifically meant to address that, and he often points out in his prefaces how this or that work would be useful to someone learning Greek, or how he included a Latin translation for the benefit of those whose Greek wasn't good enough yet (pp. 85, 87; sometimes the translation is by Aldus himself).

The fact that printing was making books widely available clearly meant a great deal to him, and occasionally he rants against “buriers of books” (bibliotaphs) who hoard manuscripts in their private libraries and don't let anyone else read them (p. 101: “I have no doubt that they will soon die of jealousy since everything worth reading will be published” :))). I completely sympathize with that, especially since nowadays the internet can be the next step in making books more easily accessible than ever before. I have had a keen interest in that ever since I got on the internet in the mid-90s. A lot has already been done in that direction, and a lot more could be done if it wasn't for those pesky copyright laws.

In a 1495 preface Aldus reports that the interest in Greek had recently grown so much that even many old men learn it, not just young ones (p. 13). Still, he says in 1497 that “Greek and Latin studies, though a little better off than for many years in the past, are still depressed” (p. 55).

He has some interesting remarks about the variety of ancient Greek dialects and the degree of freedom that this afforded to their poets, unlike e.g. in Latin (p. 31). It's tempting to think how much more variegated literature could be if everyone wrote in his own dialect (like the Greeks did before the Hellenistic period) instead of having just one standard form of each language as is usually the case nowadays.

To some extent his prefaces were of course meant as advertisements, and we should probably regard some of his enthusiastic claims as “sales patter typical of publishers” (translator's note 482, p. 360). But you cannot help admiring his honesty when he writes things like “I had hoped [. . .] to read in Philostratus' books [. . .] a great many important things worth knowing, but it really turned out quite otherwise. I cannot recall ever reading anything worse or less deserving attention; [. . .] it was tasteless and very stupid.” (P. 131.) Can you imagine a publisher putting *that* on their back cover nowadays? :)

Many of his prefaces are in the form of letters addressed to specific notable individuals, but as he himself says, they are really meant for the public at large (p. 205).

Occasionally his efforts to describe how busy he was end up being very funny: “take pity on your friend Aldus, since he often does not have time to eat or to relieve himself. Sometimes [. . .] it is not even possible to wipe our nose. What a hard profession it is!” (P. 215.)

Sometimes he gives useful advice to students, e.g. recommending them to copy some texts by hand in order to get used to the spelling and especially the accents of Greek (p. 221). The translator adds (p. 357, n. 428) a hilarious remark from a 19th-century book: “concerning that man who misplaces them [i.e. Greek accents], or, worse still, altogether omits them, damaging inferences will certainly be drawn, and in most instances with justice.” (You can see the original on archive.org; be sure to also look at the previous page for a fine rant about the Kids These Days™. :))

Aldus on his perfectionism: “I have never yet produced a book with which I felt satisfied. My love of literature is such that I want the books which I put into the hands of the educate to be very accurate and very beautiful.” (P. 241.)

As an appendix, the book includes a few letters from other people to Aldus. There's a letter from William Grocyn, an Englishman who had studied in Italy around 1490, with this delightful opinion about Aristotle and Plato: “the difference between these two greatest of philosophers is simply — forgive me, everyone — the difference between a polymath and a ‘polymyth’.” (P. 285.) From what I've seen of Plato and his enthusiasm for inventing wild tales and inserting them in his philosophical dialogues, the term “polymyth” strikes me as very appropriate.

Aldus established something he called the “New Academy”, and often refers to it in his prefaces as if the books were being issued by this academy. But from the statutes of the academy, included here on pp. 289–93, it seems to have been mostly a sort of social club for Aldus and his friends, who wanted to practice speaking Greek to each other. Anyone caught using another language was to pay a fine, and when enough funds had been accumulated they were to be used by Aldus to throw a party for the members. Sounds fun :) It reminded me a little of an anecdote in Tolstoy's War and Peace. When Russia was at war with Napoleon's France, a group of Russian aristocrats grew a bit embarrassed by the abundance of French in their everyday conversation, and agreed that anyone caught speaking French would pay a small sum of money as a contribution to the war effort. One of them, on being fined thusly, complained: “But how am I supposed to express that in Russian?” :))

Aldus's enthusiasm for Greek was so great that sometimes he even wrote his prefaces in it (though judging by the translator's notes, Aldus and many other renaissance humanists made a lot more errors in Greek than when writing Latin; n. 26 on p. 326). As an appendix there is also a 200-line poem (pp. 303–17) by Marcus Musurus, a Greek who had edited several volumes for Aldus, including Plato's works (pp. 243, 257; “an exceptionally gifted textual critic”, n. 516 on p. 362). This is probably the first book in the ITRL series where we have such extensive amounts of Greek. I was surprised to see how much leading they used for Greek in this volume; perhaps the idea is that it's useful because Greek has so many accent-marks, and yet people normally manage to print Greek just fine without such an excessive amount of leading. As a result this book fits much less text on a page when the text is Greek than when it is in Latin.

A notable innovation by Aldus was to print smaller, pocket-sized books (p. xv and n. 228 on p. 344) rather than just the bulky folios that probably predominated earlier. There's an interesting letter from Scipione Forteguerri, a member of Aldus's circle, praising one of these small books: “The charm of its contents wil not contribute as much as its handiness [. . .] lest readers should be distracted from the contents of the text by the weight of the volumes being handled.” (Pp. 297–9.)

There are some interesting remarks on Aldus's Greek typeface, which tried to imitate various abbreviations and ligatures that the scribes had used in their handwritten books to save time on frequently occurring suffixes and the like. The translator clearly dislikes this: “Aldus' influence was so great that these annoying and aesthetically unpleasing conventions remained in use until the nineteenth century” (p. 325, n. 11). But he admits that Aldus probably had good reasons to imitate handwritten books because some of his potential buyers were still distrustful of the printed book (p. xiv).

This was a very interesting book and I definitely look forward to reading the second volume of Aldus's prefaces, hopefully in the not too distant future.

BOOK: James Nelson, "The Early Nineties"

James Nelson: The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. SBN 674222253. xvii + 387 pp.

Introduction

The Bodley Head was a London publishing house, started in 1887 as a partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane. They became famous in the early 1890s for both the content and the production values of their books, many of which were written by young avantgarde authors of that period — aesthetes, decadents, and the like. In addition, the Bodley Head books were typically produced to a high standard, often on handmade paper, issued in limited editions, illustrated by daring and innovative artists such as Ricketts and Beardsley, etc. Thus, these publishers were one of the main representatives (and instigators) of the 1890s trend for books that were self-consciously aesthetic and elitist not just in terms of content but also technical aspects, print runs, and often in price.

This book is a history of the Bodley Head from the beginning until 1894, when the two partners split and went their separate ways (though they both continued to work as publishers). I first heard of this book a couple of years ago, when I read James Nelson's 2000 book about Leonard Smithers, Publisher to the Decadents. There I saw that Nelson had also written two other books about notable 1890s publishers, namely The Early Nineties (1971) and Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (1989). So now I've read the Early Nineties, and I plan to read his book about Elkin Mathews eventually as well.

Overall, The Early Nineties was a fairly interesting read. My main complaint is that a lot of the material here, maybe as much as half of the text (after you exclude the appendices and the notes and the like) deals with the authors and contents of the books published by the Bodley Head, rather than just with the aspects directly related to the publishing and production side of the books. Along the way we learn a little bit about a large number of English fin-de-siecle writers and poets, many of whom are relatively little known nowadays. Nelson often quotes passages from their works and discusses the responses of the critics. All this is interesting in a way, but often I was also bored and felt that the author was going into more detail than I cared to read about. My general impression of these parts of the book is that they were pleasant in moderate doses, but if you try to read too much at once you might get bored. But anyway, I shouldn't complain; the title of the book is honest enough: it isn't purely a book about the Bodley Head, but about the early 1890s in English literature, as seen through the books published by the Bodley Head.

The business side of publishing

My favourite chapter is probably chapter 3, which focuses on the economics of the Bodley Head's publishing. See e.g. p. 77: “Toward the close of the 1880s there were signs which suggested that there was a relatively large group of persons who were willing to buy not only rare and exotic volumes from the antiquarian bookseller but also choice limited editions of contemporary authors. [. . .] I have already shown that in the 1880s there was an increasing interest in antiquarian books. Auction records and sale catalogues amply indicate the fact that prices for book rarities were rising rapidly because of a surprisingly widespread demand.” Mathews would have been aware of these trends, having been an antiquarian bookseller himself.

Later, the vogue for “rare and exotic volumes” even gave a new lease of life to some older books. “So certain was the Bodley Head of its ability to sell these books that it was later to buy up the remainders of books which, having been published in the early 1880s and therefore lacking the advantage of vogue, did not find sufficient buyers.” (P. 79; for example, they bought 220 copies of Oscar Wilde's 1881 Poems, from its original publisher, who had gone bankrupt.) Similarly, the Bodley Head had considerable success with reissues of works by Lord De Tabley which had all largely flopped in the 1880s (p. 132). The story of the Bodley Head's publication of De Tabley's poems is told at great length on pp. 132–47; I doubt I have ever seen an author express such pessimism about his own work and its chances of success. When trying to decide which poems to include in the book, De Tabley made two lists titled “Dustbin I” and “Dustbin II” (p. 135) :)

Publishers such as the Bodley Head also benefited from the relatively low production costs of the time. “Although today it is an extremely expensive — almost prohibitive — affair to print fine editions of belles-lettres in very small quantities, the cost of book production in the early nineties was so low that the Bodley Head not only printed editions of 350 copies and made a profit but charged on the average no more than five shillings net per copy.” (P. 84; see more about production costs later on the same page.)

This is really remarkable; according to this inflation calculator, five shillings in 1890 is equivalent to approx. £19 nowadays — which is quite a typical price for a new trade hardcover of non-genre fiction, but a fine-press edition would be much more expensive.

Another interesting thing was that poetry books were cheaper to produce than books of prose, because the printers charged less for setting type in larger sizes and with more spacing, both of which was more likely to happen with poems than with prose (p. 85).

Lane and Mathews also sold some of their books in the USA, through various U.S.-based publishers such as Copeland and Day. Interestingly, “these copies sold at considerably higher prices than those on sale in England” (p. 105). Nowadays we are used to seeing books cost considerably less in the U.S. than in Britain.

“The costs of materials and labor were very low, and authors asked very litle in the way of payment so that the average price of the Bodley Head book was a very competitive five shillings [. . .] These factors plus a literary and artistic milieu which fostered an interest in belles-lettres and a desire for beautiful things were the grounds for success” (p. 106). For further interesting details about their prices, see p. 108. Their typical books cost less than comparable books earlier in the 19th century. Of course, there were also exceptions: their most expensive book was Wilde's Sphinx, which cost two guineas for the ordinary issue and five for the de luxe issue. Wilde's Salome was also more expensive thatn the average (15 and 30 shillings, respectively).

Although the Bodley Head is nowadays usually remembered for publishing the works of ‘decadents’ and similar then-controversial authors, it is only fair to point out that they also published many mainstream books: “it is doubtful that the firm could actually have survived if their ‘nest of singing birds’ had been made up solely of those whom the English public considered as one with the French poètes maudits.” (P. 211.) The more conventional works were more popular and sold better (p. 215).

Miscellaneous

A hilarious passage from a letter that the writer Le Gallienne wrote to John Lane, complaining about Lane's partner: “If there is, & decidedly there is, one person to blame in this matter it is that incarnation of all that is vacillating, procrastinating, old-maidish & [?] in human nature, that Elkin Mathews that never answered a letter till it was a month overdue, that attends to no report without the prod of a telegram, that — well, god knows you should know him” (p. 32).

Nelson's somewhat cruel opinion of Le Gallienne: “most of the pleasure his earliest books of verse afford us today comes from their external appearance, which derives from the pre-Victorian book” (p. 71) :-]

Norman Gale's 1893 book, Orchard Songs, is described on p. 65 as “a mediocre little book of verse about glow-worms, nightingales, first kisses, budding orchards and babies” :))

The poet Lionel Johnson was apparently a very nocturnal person and slept through most of the day. “Calling on Johnson one afternoon about five, Yeats, much to his surprise, was told that his new friend was not up. ‘He is always up for dinner at seven’ the servant added by way of encouragement.” (P. 179.)

On p. 211, Nelson quotes from a letter of Le Gallienne's thus: “carcas[s]es”. I'm not sure why he thought it necessary to insert the ‘s’; after all, ‘carcase’ is (or at least was) a perfectly regular alternative form of ‘carcass’.

Another good thing about The Early Nineties are the illustrations — there are many reproductions of title pages (and sometimes also of cover designs) of Bodley Head books.

The book also makes some unusual design decisions: in a typical book there would be page headers showing the title of the current chapter, but here this is shown in the footers instead. Additionally, on the first page of each chapter, the chapter title is not at the top of the page, above the text, as you would expect, but at bottom, below the text of that page. I suppose this was somebody's idea of bold, avant-garde design. I can't say that I was terribly excited by it.

Incidentally, this book also carries a price on the dust jacket — I thought it was uncommon for books published by academic presses to include a price on the dust jacket. Now I remember that the two volumes of Amadis of Gaul, published by Kentucky University Press in the 1970s, also carry prices on the jackets. So maybe this habit of not showing the price on the jacket of academic-press books is a relatively recent thing. Anyway, the other interesting thing about the price on the DJ is that it shows us that this book cost $15 in 1971! According to the inflation calculator, this would be equivalent to approx. $75 in present-day dollars, which strikes me as very expensive even for an academic press book. Fortunately I got it via abebooks.com for just $10.

ToRead:

• Richard Le Gallienne: The Book-Bills of Narcissus. An “autobiographical story” (p. 17). Le Gallienne was a writer; the Bodley Head published several of his books, and he also worked for them as a reader, giving his opinion of the manuscripts they had received.

• Richard Le Gallienne: Young Lives. An “autobiographical novel” (p. 212).

• Andrew Lang: The Library (1881); Percy Fitzgerald: The Book Fancier; John Burton: The Book-Hunter. Mentioned here on p. 22 as part of a growing 1880s interest in bibliophilism.

• Charles T. Jacobi: On the Making and Issuing of Books (1891). By the director of Chiswick Press, the printers of numerous fine-press books, including many published by the Bodley Head. Mentioned on p. 36.

• Interesting-sounding memoirs:

  • Edgar Jepson: Memories of a Victorian. P. 161.

  • William Rothenstein: Men and Memories (1931); Charles J. Holmes: Self and Partners (Mostly Self) (1936). Mentioned on p. 336.

  • Laurence Housman: The Unexpected Years (1937). P. 337.

• W. H. Mallock: The New Republic (1878). Mentioned on p. 212 as containing a “satirical and jaundiced account of the Victorian intellectual elite”.

• Florence Farr: The Dancing Fawn. “[A] notable example of the aesthetic novel of the day, which was often difficult to distinguish from novelistic parodies such as Robert Hichens' The Green Carnation” (p. 263).

• Other parodies mentioned later on the same page: John Davidson's Earl Lavender (1895) and G. S. Street's The Autobiography of a Boy.

• Katherine Lyon Mix: A Study in Yellow (U. of Kansas Press, 1960). A study of The Yellow Book (p. 298).

• Ruari McLean: Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing (1963); mentioned on p. 335. And: Modern Book Design from William Morris to the Present Day (1959), mentioned on p. 337.

• J. Lewis May: John Lane and the Nineties (1936). Mentioned on p. 342.

• John Russell Taylor: The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (MIT Press, 1966). Mentioned on p. 338.