The Wilde Album

by Merlin Holland

Fourth Estate, 1997, [First Edition], ISBN 1857027825, black and white photographic plates, photographs and illustrations throughout, illustrated endpapers, hardcover, dustjacket

Near Fine Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, minor rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows minor edge and shelf wear (See photographs)

“Oscar Wilde was one of the first and unquestionably one of the greatest self-publicists ever.  ‘I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me’. He wrote in De Profundis, his long letter from prison, and h fed greedily on all the publicity, good and bad, that the press was prepared to give him.  Above all, and with that exceptional streak of modernity which characterises much of Wilde’s life and works, he understood the power of the image in his campaign of promoting himself.  As early as his Oxford days he had himself photographed with his contemporaries in loud check suits of the latest fashion.  Later, when he toured America to lecture on aesthetics in 1882, almost as soon as he landed, he commissioned Napoleon Sarony, the best portraitist in New York, to photograph him in fur coat and velvet suit; an in not one or two poses but at least twenty-seven.”