Prospectus for The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume I, April 1894

Prospectus for The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume I, April 1894

London:

Elkin Mathews and John Lane,

1894.

Rather than merely cooperating with the Bodley Head’s promotional campaign in advance of the release of the first number of The Yellow Book—a campaign in which the more forceful and business-savvy John Lane played a larger role than Elkin Mathews—Beardsley helped to lead the drive. If his advertising poster for the magazine presented an image of feminine sweetness and passivity, as though reassuring the public that this new quarterly would be closer to the ideals of now-familiar aestheticism than of avant-garde decadence, his cover for the prospectus offered something quite different. Here was an edgy, dynamic scene of a woman—a “New Woman,” presumably, clad all in black—out alone after dark, riffling through volumes on display in front of a bookshop improbably open at night. Beardsley gave free play to his mischievous side, too, making the ridiculous Pierrot bookseller a sour-faced caricature of Elkin Mathews.

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