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

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

London:

Elkin Mathews and John Lane,

1894.

Richard Le Gallienne’s copy.

Against the glare of yellow cloth, was that a bawd, laughing and masked, on the cover of the first number of the Bodley Head’s avant-garde quarterly, for which Beardsley served as art editor? What sinister, sloe-eyed figure was that, with its enormous hat creating a perversely black halo behind her? Reviewing the April 1894 Yellow Book, an anonymous critic for The Times of London decried the “repulsiveness and insolence” of Beardsley’s “New Art” as “a combination of English rowdyism with French lubricity.” Today, we would call his designs for the front and back covers breathtakingly modern and fearless. This copy belonged to the poet Richard Le Gallienne (1866­–1947). A close associate of John Lane, Le Gallienne remained with him after the Bodley Head partnership dissolved in 1894 and even after Lane fired Beardsley from The Yellow Book in a panicked purge following Oscar Wilde’s 1895 prosecution for “gross indecency.”

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