OMAR KHAYYAM SETT, Mera K.:

First edition. One of 250 privately printed copies. Quarto. Publisher's original black cloth elaborately decorated and lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt, the others untrimmed. Illustrated title page, followed by fifteen fully calligraphed and illustrated plates of the seventy-five quatrains, each page being an original composition, with fifteen further illustrated plates under captioned tissue guards at the rear. A very good copy, the binding secure with a 5cm crack to the foot of the front hinge, very faint damp-marking to the lower board, rubbing to the extremities, and bumping to the bottom corners. The contents with a modern armorial bookplate and small ownership label to the front pastedown, a bookseller's description pasted to the front free endpaper, a previous owner's blindstamp to the front free endpaper ("The Fitzgerald Collection / Peter J. Willis"), toning and a couple of small nicks to the endpapers, and a minor tide-mark to the corners of the pastedowns and some of the tissue-guards are otherwise in very good order, the illustrations remaining clean. One of the rarest and most idiosyncratic illustrated Rubaiyats of the early twentieth century, calligraphed and illustrated by the Indian artist Mera Sett. In the foreword, Sett explains how he struggled to get his work published, with English publishers finding it "too shocking" and "likely to hurt the susceptibility of the decent minded English people". "They were ready to bring out my Omar if I changed a few pictures at their dictate and tastes, but I would not so much as a single line or dot. It seems the English (according to their publishers) would rather have the conventional fig-leaf than a cluster of roses. I stated the case to my generous father. With his usual kindness and generosity, he offered to stand the piper to the tune of a privately printed edition". Stylistically, Sett's work has similarities to that of his near-contemporary Aubrey Beardsley. In his foreword, however, he asserts that "till quite lately I knew not of Beardsley", adding that, "I formed my style on the study of Eastern drawings, especially Indian. The possibilities of black and white appeared to me from some black and white Chinese drawings I have in my possession". A review of the work in the American literary journal The Dial, stated that "so exotic and weirdly unconventional is the artist's work that one is almost at a loss to judge of its artistic quality," adding that, "the artist has not been afraid to express the spirit of frank sensuousness that is inherent in the quatrains." (8th June 1916). When Sett's Rubaiyat was later republished in India following the war, its publisher's quoted a supposed review of this first, privately printed edition by the poet Rupert Brooke: "If Mr Sett has not been universally acclaimed as the greatest draughtsman and decorator living, the fault lies with his own exclusive and publicity shunning nature. His Omar will have the pride of place in my library". This review may well be spurious, however the little-known and somewhat elusive Sett had been a contemporary of Brooke's at the University of Cambridge, where he studied law, so it could be the case that the pair had known each other.