A book of fifty drawings. With an iconography by Aymer Vallance. by BEARDSLEY, Aubrey - 1897.

London: Leonard Smithers, 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Old Bond St., 1897. 4to. 212 pp. Including sepia-tinted photo printed frontisp., 50 plates & silhouette tail-piece, and tissue guards w/ captions. Pictorial red publisher’s cloth, cover art by Beardsley, gilt ruling, gilt printer’s device on back cover, gilt lettering, t.e.g. (minor darkening & soiling to spine, minor thumbing to gutter margin of covers, slight bumping & wear to corners, front inner hinge just starting), still a VG- copy, from the library of John Quinn (1870-1924) visionary book collector, antiquarian, and literary critic who was close friends with W.B. Yeats, John Synge, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, whose famed collection went at auction from 1923-1924. This copy bears the beautiful Quinn bookplate designed by John B. Yeats, father of W.B. Yeats on the front pastedown. First edition, 1 of 500 copies printed, of this splendid collection of the art of Aubrey Beardsley spanning his very short and astonishingly productive career, including illustrations from Le Morte dArthur (1893) including the larger woodcut of Merlin, along with woodcut illustrations from Salome (1894) -- criticized at the time by the Art Journal as “terrible in its weirdness and suggestions of horror and wickedness,” A comedy of sighs, the Savoy Magazine, Leonard Smithers third rare book catalogue, and several from the Yellow Book (1894-97). The brilliant artist died at the age of 25 in 1898 while living in Menton, France for his health.