Yellowed Books

...Yellowed Books_ The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head By James G Nelson Haivaid 387 pp $15 00 Reviewed by E. Nelson Hayes Its art was generally black and white and pale pastel, its verse and prose often purple, its cover always yellow The most infamous of the hardbound periodicals that flourished m the 1890s, the first two issues of the Yellow Book produced by the Bodley Head together sold some 12,000 copies to a titillated public Reading recent anthologies selected from its pages, one is struck by the excellence and almost complete irrelevance of the writings The same can be said for the 100-odd books the Bodley Head published from 1889-94, with a few exceptions like Dostoevsky's Poor Folk It is impossible to find unifying themes and techniques among the Bodley writers and artists, despite the efforts of many scholars to do so In his new study, James G Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, offers instead "a sense of the complexities of the literary and esthetic milieu of the early nineties through the eyes of the Bodley Head " He gives a detailed history of the firm, established initially as a bookstore and then expanded into a publishing house...

...The disparity between the quality of the medium and the triviality of its message simply reflected the vague and essentially negative doctrine of estheticism As one Bodley author, Arthur Symons, defined it "We have no formulas, and we desire no false unity of form or matter We have not invented a new point of view We are not Realists, or Romanticists, of Decadents For us, all art is good which is good art " This meant a rejection of Victorian moralism and materialism, but little more The result, W B Yeats later noted, was a poverty of meaningful thought "We had such and such ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us such and such aims, as though we had many philosophical ideas I say this because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room ". The Bodley Head's founders, Elkin Mathews and John Lane, along with chief reader Rxhard Le Gallienne, may have despised Victorian commercialism, but they were businessmen first of all Like some publishers of underground newspapers and magazines today, they achieved a modest yet under the circumstances remarkable financial success Indeed, they were even accused of creating and thus profiting from rare books by issuing their volumes in limited editions, usually fewer than a thousand copies In the light of the evidence, their denial of the charge was either ingenuous or hypocritical...

...Mathews was a cautious, unadventurous procrastinator incapable of acting decisively Lane and Le Gallienne, on the other hand, were both "ambitious, desirous of success, not overscrupulous in achieving their purposes, effusive m their attentions, capable of flattery, socially adept m a cheap sort of way, sentimental and somewhat dandified in dress and air " Though their convenient menage a tiois was doomed to end in a separation on grounds of incompatibility, their genius together "lay in their ability to gainer almost the whole range of artistic production of the early nineties" Alice Meynell, John Davidson, John Addmgton Symonds, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley, William Rothenstein, and such now unknowns as Alfred Hayes It must be remembeied, however, that the same years saw the publication of major works by Comad, Gissing, Shaw, Wells, Kipling, and Hardy The esthetes were a minor if babbling branch of the mainstream...

...Perhaps the major contribution of Mathews and Lane was to the art of bookmaking Following but also modifying the lead of Moms, Rossetti, and others, they produced "tasteful" volumes characterized by their preference for type fonts other than the "modern," the two-page spread rather than the single page as a unit, the use of handmade paper, simplified title page and binding All these were reactions against the extreme ugliness of many 19th-century commercial publications, although by current standards Bodley Head books can scarcely be considered simple in design Here Nelson is at his best The Eaily Nineties is a treasure for bibliophiles, providing the pioduction details of many of the books, as well as fine illustrations of their design, which owed much to the talents of Walter Blaikie, Charles Jacobi and Charles de Sousy Ricketts...

...The similarities between the esthetes of the 1890s and the youthful avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s are too obvious, but there is one significant difference Whereas the Bodley group rejected Victorianism by calmly ignoring it, today's radicals passionately rebel against contemporary moralism and materialism Meanwhile, of course, most Englishmen in that earlier age went on joyfully celebrating the growth of empire and commerce just as, with some reservations, do most Americans now...