Poster for Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries

Aubrey Beardsley

Poster for Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries

London:

T. Fisher Unwin,

[1894].

Color lithograph.

T. (Thomas) Fisher Unwin competed with John Lane for fiction by authors who rebelled against convention. Among the titles advertised in Beardsley’s poster for the two series known as the Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries was the bestselling Some Emotions and a Moral (1891) by “John Oliver Hobbes” (Pearl Richards Craigie, 1867–1906), later a Yellow Book contributor. The poster itself was an arresting one, from the awkwardly positioned arm of its central figure, whose body seemed simultaneously to point forwards and backwards, to the inexplicable presence of a tree bound and restrained in a red frame. Beardsley’s controversial images of women in advertising may have inspired “The Poster Girl,” a poem by the American humorist Carolyn Wells (1862–1942), which includes the lines, “Perhaps I am absurd — perhaps/ I don't appeal to you;/ But my artistic worth depends/ Upon the point of view.”

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press