by Rick Gekoski
Sangorski had a taste for the mysticism of the East – his dreams, Stonehouse observed, ‘must have been of Oriental lands and colours which he had never seen’, except perhaps in the then popular musical Kismet, which played at the Garrick Theatre and which Sangorski saw multiple times. He loved, too, Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat, which had been published in its first English edition of 250 copies by the bookseller Bernard Quaritch in 1859.
The eccentric Fitzgerald was an unlikely bedfellow for Omar Khayyam. Hardly an unrestrained sensualist, his marriage had lasted only a few months, after which he had a few ‘friendships’ with men. A vegetarian who hated vegetables, he lived largely on tea, fruit, and bread and butter – a bit like Lord Byron, except for the butter – and wasn’t all that keen on his jug of wine. There is a feeling of wish-fulfilment about his translation of Khayyam, for Fitzgerald had altogether too few rosebuds to gather. Indeed, Khayyam’s verse could have been aimed at him, as if begging his translator to change his ways, and get more fun out of life:
Waste not your flour, nor in vain pursuit
Of this and that endeavour and dispute;
Better be merry with the fruitful grape
Than sadden after none or bitter fruit.
A studious and retiring man, Fitzgerald indulged himself immoderately only in his Oriental fantasies, though his ‘rather free’ (equals ‘not very accurate’) translation of The Rubaiyat was an immediate and resounding failure. So few copies sold that within two years Mr Quaritch placed the book on a stand outside his doors, offering copies at a penny apiece. (They now fetch £20,000.) A friend bought Dante Gabriel Rossetti this cut-price present, and the delighted recipient shared his new enthusiasm with Swinburne and William Morris. Further copies were purchased and exchanged, enthusiasm blossomed, and the book slowly became a word-of-mouth sensation. Over the next decades it was reviewed frequently and reprinted numerous times.
In 1884 the book was illustrated by the celebrated American artist Elihu Vedder. The Rubaiyat is one of Vedder’s best-known works, and the complete suite of his fifty-four drawings for it was exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1998. Trained in Paris well before it was fashionable, Vedder learned the requisite academic skills and became known for his classical female nudes. His Omar Khayyam (for which he also designed the linings, cover and lettering) was notable for what the artist called a ‘cosmic swirl’, which he defined as the ‘gradual concentration of elements that combined to form life; the sudden pause through the reverse of the movement which marks the instant of life; & then the gradual, ever-widening dispersion again of those elements into space’. The book was published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin in two formats: a fancy one on large paper, limited to 100 copies bound in leather, at $100; and a more modest, smaller copy at $25. Both sold out in six days, and set the standard for American illustrated books for many years to come. Copies of the de luxe edition now sell for as much as £25,000.
It was a happy relationship between Omar, his translator Edward Fitzgerald and Vedder himself, who commented: ‘certainly three kindred spirits have here encountered each other, and although the first two missed each other on earth by eight centuries, and the last two by twelve months, still in the heart of the survivor lingers the hope that in the life “sans end” they may all yet meet.’
Vedder’s celebrated edition (which now feels as clunky and dated as his contemporary Gustave Doré’s similarly outsize and lifeless illustrations) recommended itself immediately to Francis Sangorski – a fourth party in this happy set of conjunctions of poet, translator, artist and binder. It was big enough (some 15½ inches tall) and, to his eye, positively crying out for those thousand jewels. He would wave his finger in the air, tracing possible designs if he were to be given a commission to bind such a book: ‘I would stand three peacocks in the middle, and surround them with jewelled decoration such as has never been dreamed of before.’
In the early years of his partnership with Sutcliffe, Sangorski had already designed a number of fanciful and stunningly accomplished bindings for The Rubaiyat, which had so impressed Sotheran’s John Stonehouse that in 1909, after listening once again to Sangorski’s description of what he could do if only he were allowed, he offered what the current manager of Sangorski and Sutcliffe, Rob Shepherd, has described as ‘the most incredible commission ever given to a bookbinder in the history of the craft’:
Do it and do it well; there is no limit, put what you like into the binding, charge what you like for it; the greater the price the more I shall be pleased; provided only that it is understood, that what you do, and what you charge for, will be justified by the result; and the book when it is finished is to be the greatest modern binding in the world; these are the only instructions.
Stonehouse offered this extraordinary brief without informing his employer, who would have found it an unacceptable risk, but felt he was justified because ‘there has never been, in the history of the Binding Trade, a man such as Sangorski’.
Jewelled bindings, which occupied a special place in Sangorski’s imagination, have a thousand-year history, and appear in opulent splendour throughout the royal libraries of Europe. Yet curiously little has been written about them. I can locate no book on the subject, and even Wikipedia’s tentacles stretch to only a cursory entry. When asked why this might be, Rob Shepherd could offer no explanation, though he is intending to fill the gap with a monograph on the subject.
I wonder, though, if the subject of jewelled bindings has been largely ignored, despite a plethora of information about fine bindings generally, because it is regarded as an eccentric and faintly embarrassing byway of the craft. Most fine binders would never attempt such a thing, not merely because they have not the requisite skills, but also because they regard the results at showy and excessive, and the likely buyers of such costly trinkets as equally objectionable. Certainly there is now little taste for the form. The examples one comes across at book fairs and auctions (so someone must collect them) are at least eighty years old. Jewelled bindings are now widely regarded not as art (too vulgar) but as elaborate craft, gone wrong. Describing such bindings, terms such as ‘opulent,’ ‘extravagant’ and ‘luxurious’ recommend themselves so insistently – one thumbs through the thesaurus seeking alternatives – that it feels like searching for adequate adjectives to describe Liberace’s hair.
Sangorski once executed a jewelled binding for a Poems of Keats, the cover of which had vines of jewelled grapes, which may contain a fleeting allusion to the line in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – ‘With beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ – but the connection is fanciful and basically meaningless. Most such bindings are conventionally described not in terms of their relationship to the texts that they cover but as jewellery: containing so many rubies, amethysts, garnets, turquoises, as if they were taken from Elizabeth Taylor’s dressing table and she was going to wear them to a bibliophile’s ball.
It is the number and richness of the ornamentation that seems to matter. Thus, when the newspapers picked up the story, all of a sudden the binding had 1,500 jewels. That made it even more important! But Sangorski’s work had distinguished itself not merely in the amount and weight of its jewels and gold but also because, for once, it was genuinely appropriate. He was not merely trying to create a surface of the most extraordinary opulence, but had thought hard about the contents of the Rubaiyat, and was attempting to render an image of them that was both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
Work began on the Rubaiyat in 1909. Sangorski spent eight months making six different designs for the binding, with such meticulousness that he even spent a day at London Zoo watching a snake’s jaws opening as it devoured a live rat. The image of a skull (on the rear cover) is so anatomically correct as to suggest substantial prior study. (Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, another jewel- encrusted human skull, is a similar combination of the absurd and the exquisite, and even more expensive.)
The Omar took over two years
of full-time work – some 2,500 hours – to produce. Its front board was of unparalleled magnificence in modern binding: three peacocks – as Sangorski had always imagined them – placed at the centre beneath a Persian arch, were modelled in blue leather, their tail feathers set with topazes, their crests decorated with eighteen turquoises, their eyes with rubies. This was bordered by elaborately swirling acanthus leaves and bunches of grapes elaborately tooled with gold.
But the delights of this front image, its colourful optimism and luxury, are only part of the overall design. Fitzgerald had described the Rubaiyat as ‘a strange farrago of the grave and the gay’, as any ‘gather ye rosebuds’ text must be. And so the back panel contains a perfect, eerie image of a skull, executed in white calf with ivory teeth, with poppy flowers (frequently associated with death) sprouting from its eye sockets.
In 1911 Sotheran’s issued a catalogue offering the book for sale at a price of £1,000. (By way of comparison, D. H. Lawrence was then teaching in Croydon at a salary of £95 a year, and the Sotheran price, if correlated to pounds sterling in 2013 would be £330,000.) A contemporary review of Sangorski’s expensive masterpiece in the Graphic magazine confirmed that Stonehouse’s commission had been triumphantly fulfilled: the binding was ‘unquestionably the most magnificent production of its kind in modern times’.
The New York rare book dealer Gabriel Weiss (or Wells, as he was sometimes called) rushed to Sotheran’s to see it and made an offer of £800, but was offered no more than the customary dealer’s discount of 10 per cent and walked away. The book remained on display in the shop, more admired than purchased. It was then shipped to America in the hope of attracting a buyer (three-quarters of Sangorski and Sutcliffe’s bindings were bought by American collectors), but because Vedder’s edition did not bear the date of its publication in 1884 (which would have made it dutyfree), customs officials argued that there was no proof that it was more than twenty years old, and demanded substantial duty. It was an easy enough problem to solve – all you had to produce was a letter from the publisher – but Mr Sotheran gave a peremptory order for it to be sent home immediately.
Sensibly enough, the increasingly anxious Stonehouse got back in touch with Mr Weiss to see if he might be willing to pay £750, but instead received the tough counter-offer of £650. At which point Mr Sotheran, who had never approved of the project (once he had heard of it), sent the book off in a huff to Sotheby’s, to be offered for sale with no reserve price. It was a foolish time to do so: a coal strike was badly affecting the economy, and money was tight. On 29 March 1912 Weiss bought the book in the saleroom at the modest price of £405, just over half of what he had originally offered. The book, now widely known as the ‘Great Omar’, was packed in an oak casket to protect it from damage, ready to be shipped to its new owner in New York, who must have thought he was a pretty smart cookie. (He was: he later became the owner of Sotheran’s Bookshop itself.)
To understand what happened next, you have to invoke chaos theory, and the fluttering of that butterfly’s wings. On the same day that the Great Omar sold at auction, which merited some small mention in the press, a much more newsworthy event was happening in Antarctica, where Scott and his team had failed to beat the Norwegian Amundsen to the South Pole. They had been delayed, in Scott’s words, ‘by severe weather which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause’, which had not merely retarded their progress but also led to the deaths of all of the members of the expedition on that fateful day.
According to some modern climatologists, there was a link between the unusual conditions at the South Pole and those pertaining at the same time at the North Pole, which had experienced unseasonably warm weather – both poles affected, though in opposite ways, by La Niña warming, which saw more icebergs carved off the west coast of Greenland than in the previous fifty years.
The Great Omar was booked for its American crossing on 6 April, but due to the coal strike no further freight was taken on board. The book thus left Southampton on the next available ship, four days later. The carrier was the SS Titanic, and it was not long before the weather conditions that had claimed Scott’s life had sunk that ship, and killed 1,517 of its passengers. On board, amongst the richly bejewelled first-class passengers, there was also a haul of over $200 million worth of diamonds, shipped by two brothers from Switzerland, as well as the 1,051 precious stones adorning Francis Sangorski’s masterpiece.
Labelled ‘unsinkable’ by the Vice-President of the White Star Line, the Titanic was both the largest and the most luxurious (if you were in First Class) liner ever launched. What happened, though, was no surprise to any seaman. Joseph Conrad, responding to the formal inquiry into the sinking of the ship, was exasperated, and literal: ‘the ship scraped her side against a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot of people down with her.’
Thomas Hardy took a similar line: if you have a genuinely immovable object, it will scupper an allegedly irresistible force. His 1915 poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the Loss of the Titanic’ is an appropriate epitaph for both that great ship, and for Sangorski’s Omar:
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Vanity, all is vanity. Like Conrad, who recoiled at the ‘vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury’, Hardy’s focus is on the colossal extravagance of the Titanic, and its collision (or convergence) with the iceberg attains an eerie moral inevitability. No mention is made of the loss of life.
The loss of the Great Omar, like the loss of the Titanic, teases the mind with questions about how such a fate might have been averted. The great bindery that created the Rubaiyat, having preserved the elaborate designs, was immediately anxious to produce another copy. No one was likely to raise the Titanic, but Sangorski and Sutcliffe could resurrect their Omar. Within two weeks, the firm wrote a letter to the Telegraph:
We, as designers and binders of this book have pleasure in stating that all the designs were copyrighted by us, and are still in our possession; and we would beg to point out that instead of working to no definite plan the work was executed from working designs every detail of which is recorded … it is quite possible for us to reproduce the whole work.
But tragedy followed tragedy: On 1 July 1912, some ten weeks after the ship sank, Francis Sangorski, while bathing in the sea at Selsey Bay in Sussex, went bravely to the rescue of a woman who was drowning. He saved her life but was himself sucked under by the current, and died at the age of thirty-seven.
His widow, Frances, was left with four young children. For a time she worked for the firm, which was now being steered steadily through the war years by the capable George Sutcliffe, who, though lacking the genius of his former partner, continued to produce elaborate jewelled bindings. Indeed, during the first year of the war the bindery sold that jewelled copy of Keats’s Some Poems for £1,400, a sum that confirmed that the Omar had been fairly priced by Sotheran’s, and must have made Gabriel Weiss regret having dithered about his purchase of it, for, had he bought it in the first instance, it surely would have survived.
Curiously, when a second Omar was finally made, even George Sutcliffe didn’t know about it. His nephew, the immensely able Stanley Bray, who had access to the original designs, conceived the notion of making another copy on his own, after returning from work each day at the bindery. It took him seven years, and was finished in 1939.
But the Second World War was then inevitable, and the securely packaged book was placed in a bank vault in the City of London. Two years later, after heavy bombing of the City, and a resulting spate of fierce fires driven by wind, the book was destroyed, literally melting in the heat. All that was left – Thomas Hardy would have appreciated this – was the jewels, which were later rescued from their congealed leather binding. In John Stonehouse’s sad appraisal, ‘a fatality seemed to follow the book.’ Or perhaps the book caused th
e fatality? ‘I come like water, and like the wind, I go’, as Omar put it.
But it was curiously determined not to be lost to the world, the Sangorski Omar, anxious to be reborn. Towards the end of his life Stanley Bray attempted yet another copy, which can now be found at the British Library, though it is less distinguished than the 1911 version.
It wasn’t until 1998, when his firm moved offices to Bankside, that Rob Shepherd, searching for the first time through the archive of the old firm of Sangorski and Sutcliffe, discovered that the complete designs for the 1911 Rubaiyat had unexpectedly been preserved. It was, he says, ‘an unforgettable experience’, which confirmed in full detail just how magnificent a work the original binding had been. The records were complete: the preliminary sketches and a full book of Sangorski’s tooling patterns and designs were accompanied by a set of glass negatives of the binding, and the original black-and-white photographs of it. Everything you would need, if the right commission were offered, to make yet another copy.
Alas, there are no more John Stonehouses in the rare book world, but there are still avid collectors of such material. If any of them has the requisite £333,000, the Great Omar might just rise again.
It’s a nice thought, but it isn’t likely to happen. There are plenty of collectors, of both rare books and of fine bindings, who could afford such a price, but the binding that Sangorski so triumphantly provided for the Great Omar is now an anachronism which has to be appreciated in its historical context, as Rob Shepherd acknowledges:
To some modern eyes, its opulence and excessive decoration seem rather absurd, but in the context of Edwardian England, Sangorski’s extravagant interpretation of Khayyam’s verses fits perfectly with the spirit of his time. The First World War brought that period of opulence to an abrupt end, but the book remains a potent symbol of the innocence and confidence of those pre-War years. After 1918, the world is a very different place.
