Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The First and Fourth Renderings in English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald. With Illustrations by Willy Pogany. London: George G. Harrap, 1930. First Edition Thus. publisher’s original orange cloth covers, gilt title lettering and symmetrical gilt scroll designs to the spine, gilt lettering and gilt design on black ground to the front cover. In publisher’s dust jacket, A fine bright copy.

Edward FitzGerald’s version enriched with twelve full-page colour illustrations by Willy Pogany & forty-five small mounted illustrated labels and decorations in black on gold paper with parallel black woodcut decorations to the sides. Willy Pogany had previously illustrated the Rubaiyat in 1909, but these later illustrations are quite a different interpretation, more westernized and modernized than the earlier ones.

Omar Khayyám (1048-1131) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet. His Rubaiyat is regarded as the chief exemplar of the Arabic verse form “roba’i,” a poem composed in quatrains in which the first, second and fourth lines rhyme.