Details
WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900). Autograph letter signed ('Oscar Wilde') to Leonard Smithers, Hotel Royal des Etrangers, Naples, 22 September 1897, 5 pages, 8vo, on hotel paper (minor soiling and light restoration to folds).
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL NEARS COMPLETION: 'I hope really to complete it this week when I will send it to you but till the last three days I have been too unhappy and distressed to write anything. Now I feel all my old power coming back to me. I am quite happy now'; he has met, and is much impressed with, the German artist Paul Herrmann, 'who is very anxious to do a cover and a frontispiece design for the poem ... His genius is sombre, troubled and macabre ... I now feel that the poem should be published in a very artistic form, with a wonderful cover (paper of course)', proposing that the profits from the edition should be shared, with a £10 limit on advertisements and a £20 advance if it is not published in any English newspaper. A postscript adds the reflection that in order to match Herrmann's drawing style, the type of the poem should be 'large and strong. Would you let me have the strongest, blackest, finest type you have?'.
Smithers was to publish the Ballad in February 1898 -- though without Herrmann's designs, which he was too slow in producing.
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL NEARS COMPLETION: 'I hope really to complete it this week when I will send it to you but till the last three days I have been too unhappy and distressed to write anything. Now I feel all my old power coming back to me. I am quite happy now'; he has met, and is much impressed with, the German artist Paul Herrmann, 'who is very anxious to do a cover and a frontispiece design for the poem ... His genius is sombre, troubled and macabre ... I now feel that the poem should be published in a very artistic form, with a wonderful cover (paper of course)', proposing that the profits from the edition should be shared, with a £10 limit on advertisements and a £20 advance if it is not published in any English newspaper. A postscript adds the reflection that in order to match Herrmann's drawing style, the type of the poem should be 'large and strong. Would you let me have the strongest, blackest, finest type you have?'.
Smithers was to publish the Ballad in February 1898 -- though without Herrmann's designs, which he was too slow in producing.
Special notice
Buyers from within the EU:
VAT payable at 17.5% on just the buyer's premium (NOT the hammer price)
Buyers from outside the EU:
VAT payable at 17.5% on hammer price and buyer's premium. If a buyer, having registered under a non-EU address, decides that an item is not to be exported from the EU, then he/she should advise Christie's to this effect immediately.