0.1 Afterword  (Page 2/25)

When he chose Mathews and Lane as publishers for The Sphinx , then, Wilde was making a calculated decision about the company his work would keep as well as the form inwhich his works would be issued: as Stetz remarks, “the phrase ‘Bodley Head book’ came to possess a particular meaning and…raised a quite specific set ofexpectations” (Stetz, 71). Prominent among those expectations was the firm’s reputation for publishing what Tennyson would have termed “poisonous honeystolen from the flowers of France” (quoted Nelson, The Early Nineties , 184)—poetry “heavily influenced by Swinburne, [that]belonged to what was known in the Victorian period as the ‘fleshly school’—sensuous rhymes constructed around sensualsubjects” (Stetz, 72; see Nelson, The Early Nineties , 184-220). But no less important was the reputation of Mathews and Lane for producing books whose physical appearance and design beliedtheir relatively low cost. Close attention was given to such matters as paper quality and texture, binding materials (usually dyed cloth), typeface, and pagelayout. Master printers such as Walter Blaikie, of the firm T. and A. Constable, or Ballantyne Hanson and Co. of Edinburgh, were employed for printing purposes;and designers of considerable talent were employed to decorate—but not necessarily to illustrate—the book. Many of these designers—Walter Crane,William Strang, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, Laurence Housman—are now renowned as “artists” in their own right, and although they were occasionallycommissioned to contribute illustrations, as in the case of The Sphinx or Wilde’s Salome , they were more typically employed by Mathews and Lane to contribute a distinctive gilt-stamped cover design, an originalfrontispiece, or an attractive title page (or all three) to the Bodley Head book. If, as Wilde contended, “what is interesting about people in good society…is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality behind the mask” (“The Decay of Lying,” 297), such decorative details constituted the “mask” in whichthe literary work engaged its public, and they bore out Wilde’s longstanding contention that any visual performance or staging was dependent upon “smalldetails of dress” (“The Truth of Masks,” 410). The fact that Bodley Head books were issued in strictly limited editions, typically in print runs of a fewhundred copies, with twenty-five or fifty extra copies printed on larger paper to be sold as a special or “deluxe” edition, added to their air of exclusivityand other-worldliness. In this respect, as Margaret Stetz has argued, Mathews and Lane made a virtue of necessity brilliantly, sincethe small batches of often-remaindered paper that they bought cheaply meant that they were forced to limit the number of copies printed (Stetz, 74). All of these traits are evident in the edition of The Sphinx reproduced here: Henley might just as easily have remarked, upon reviewing the book, that it was “about as Bodley Head a business,” or astypical a Bodley Head business, “as you ever saw.” Although The Sphinx represents the epitome of the Bodley Head’s practice of issuing finely printedbooks containing a strong graphic or decorative component, it was nonetheless the most expensive book in their 1894 catalogue, and in some ways even thestandard issue comes closer to private press books of the period than to the most common Bodley Head books. Ricketts’s admiration for the work of WilliamMorris is well documented, and although The Sphinx is designed according to very different principles from those applied by William Morris in the design and printing of books issued by Morris’sKelmscott Press (1891-1898), the influence of Morris’s “typographical adventure” upon The Sphinx is palpable. Significantly, The Sphinx was printed on specially made unbleached paper (laid paper for the standard issue: handmadepaper for the large-paper copies) bearing the watermark of Ricketts’s own private press, the Vale Press; and paper so watermarked was subsequently usedagain, repeatedly, by Ricketts for the production of books emanating from the Vale Press. Nonetheless, Ricketts refused to consider The Sphinx to be a "Vale book" since it was "without woodcuts" ( A Defence , 24).