Goblin Market and Other Poems
London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co., 1862.
First edition, first printing. vii, [1], 192 pp. In a beautiful signed binding by Alfred de Sauty. Bound without ads in crimson crushed morocco elaborately tooled in gilt, top edge gilt, gilt-ruled turn-ins, watermarked laid endpapers. Near Fine with light wear and sunning, shallow chip to head of spine, and small bump to lower front corner. Small inkstain to fore edge of textblock, offsetting to endpapers, and light toning and widely scattered foxing to contents, more concentrated at prelims.
The first edition of Christina Rossetti’s first book, containing her most famous poem, "Goblin Market.” Christina’s brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti designed the woodcuts for the illustrated title spread, incorporating one of the wombats that he and his sister both loved. One reviewer called his woodcuts “rather grotesque,” and some felt the same way about Christina’s weird and sensual title poem, but most readers were thrilled. Rossetti remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, and “Goblin Market” is considered the ne plus ultra of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. This copy is appropriately bound in the crimson of slightly oxidized blood:
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
The fruit-merchant men are goblins. Young Laura succumbs to their enticements one night and devours their sweetly poisonous fruit, sucking until her lips are sore. The goblins then disappear, leaving Laura literally dying for a taste of more until her sister brings her the antidote. Red imagery abounds in the poem – a flushed sunset, flushed cheeks, tingling lips, flames, and of course red fruit, including "bright-fire-like" barberries and “plump unpecked cherries.”
Bookbinder Alfred de Sauty seems to been inspired by the cherries. His sumptuous gold tooling is a masterpiece of Japonisme, a pattern of interlocking circles incorporating the heraldic cherry blossom motif and drawing on the gold-on-black botanical designs of lacquerwork. The erotic medievalism of Christina Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite poetry has been appropriately clothed in the aesthetic of that movement’s Asian-influenced Decadent successor. De Sauty, a master binder mentioned by name in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, probably bound this book between 1898 and 1914. The First World War cut the demand for fine bindings, and de Sauty set down his tools for some years before leaving England in 1923 to successfully direct the bindery at Lakeside Press in Chicago.
De Sauty’s skill at assembling lines into patterns may have its origins in his first career as an electrician. He left school at seventeen to work for the Eastern Telegraph Company and spent eleven years crossing the world to repair telegram cables. He drew in his spare time and subscribed to the influential art magazine The Studio, which in one issue ran illustrations of bindings by T.J Cobden-Sanderson that inspired de Sauty to give up his career and learn the craft himself.
Working for the Eastern Telegraph Company had been an obvious first choice of career for the son of Charles Victor de Sauty, who worked for the same company and was instrumental in the laying of undersea telegraph cables in the 1850s and 60s, a radical development in communication that seemed almost magical at the time. The first cable was laid from Ireland to Newfoundland, and the first message was transmitted in August 1858 from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. The cable soon weakened, and it died just three weeks after Victoria’s congratulatory message. There would be no more transatlantic communications until 1866, when better cables were laid.
That first attempt was followed breathlessly by the public, each short message reported in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. Charles Victor was Superintendent of the Newfoundland Station and its communications were signed with his last name, prompting the American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to commemorate him in verse:
When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
There was a brief period when “De Sauty” was the most prominent name in America, though at the time no one knew if there was a real person behind it or if it was merely the Newfoundland call sign. A Boston newspaper questioned the mysterious figure’s absence from the 1879 quarter centenary celebration:
“We well remember the profound emotions which this unknown and mysterious, yet unquestionably imposing signature, stirred in our youthful imagination a score of years ago. If there were ever a name to conjure with, to work miracles with, to call telegrams with from the vasty deep, surely it would be this, ‘De Sauty’….But De Sauty has never been heard of since that August of 1858. Was he a vampyre, a cable-vampyre, sucking the life from the cable he was meant to nurse, and did he meet the fate of a vampyre from those interested in the deceased?”
De Sauty had in fact simply moved on in his career and was working in Gibraltar, where young Alfred was born. There is a pleasing circularity in the binding of Goblin Market by the son of a man who gave Americans a taste of new pleasures and then withdrew them, disappearing into the ether. It is even more charming that the son, like his father, should leave his mark in the form of an imposing signature. Blessed is the collector who owns a volume with “DE SAUTY” on the doublure or turn-in – it is a name to conjure the golden age of bookbinding.
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood.
At the polar focus of the wire electric
Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
Called himself "DE SAUTY."
Price: $10,000