[Literature] [Beardsley, Aubrey] Poe, Edgar Allan The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894-95. In 10 volumes. Large paper edition, #150/250 numbered copies. Edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry. Illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of Poe, and others, in each volume, and plates by Albert Edward Sterner. Original full vellum, ornately stamped in an Arts and Crafts-style floral design on boards and spine, boards and spine darkened and with scattered foxing, scratch along spine of Volume I, head of spine on Volumes IV, VI, and VIII chipped, others variously worn, feet of spine variously worn; all edges untrimmed; foxing to endpapers and prelims in all volumes, scattered light foxing and minor soiling to text in same; with the Arts and Crafts-style book-plate of United States judge Harold R. Medina on front paste-down of each volume.

Together with:

(Beardsley, Aubrey)
Group of Four Illustrations for The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
(Chicago, 1894-95). Four plates printed on japon vellum, loose as issued; each measuring 8 x 5 1/8 in. (203 x 130 mm); in original full vellum portfolio, matching the above set, toned and with scattered spotting; with the Arts and Crafts-style book-plate of United States judge Harold R. Medina on interior of front flap. Plates variously toned; first plate creased along top right edge. Lasner 80

Rare, one of likely only 10 sets of Beardsley's illustrations. Includes illustrations for The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Fall of the House of Usher. "In late December 1893 the Chicago publisher Stone and Kimball commissioned Beardsley to provide illustrations for the 'Tales' section of the large paper version of Poe's collected works. The four designs he completed appeared not in the volumes themselves, but in a separate, undated, portfolio, about which there is uncertainty regarding the number of copies produced. In his authoritative history of the firm, Sidney Kramer makes no mention of the Beardsley portfolio, but does describe an entirely different (but identically bound) portfolio containing 18 engravings by mid-19th-century French artists. Kramer connects this to the Japan paper 'edition' apparently reserved for the Poe set's collaborators and never offered for sale. Gallatin at first believed that the Beardsley portfolio formed part of the large paper issue (250 copies on handmade paper) but later, in the Princeton catalogue he compiled with Alexander Wainwright, concluded that it 'accompanied the Japan paper issue which consisted of only ten sets.' As evidence that Gallatin was correct, Warrack and Perkins cite the portfolio's scarcity; they located just six copies..." (Mark Samuels Lasner, A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 50-51).