In mufti
PAUL GRINKE
The Lysistrata of Aristophanes Aubrey Beardsley (Routledge and Kegan Paul 12gns) At a time when most people have happily consigned Beardsley back to the limbo from which Mr Brian Reade rescued him at the Victoria and Albert Museum some three years ago, Routledge and Kegan Paul have issued an expensive facsimile of what must be his most notorious work. The illustrated Lysistrata has always been a bibliophile's indulgence and that genial rogue Leonard Smithers, who first issued it in 1896 in a discreet edition of one hundred copies, had his finger firmly on the pulse of the biblio- maniac market. The facsimile edition is limited to 515 copies, of which fifteen are hors de commerce, which is a true limita- tion and probably a fair guess at the num- ber of potential customers. As a collector's item it deserves to be subjected to the strictest bibliophilic criteria and, with one or two lapses, it emerges with flying colours.
It is obviously impossible to gauge how accurate a facsimile it is without access to the original, but at first sight it looks ex-
tremely convincing. The text is reproduced by photolithography on excellent hand- made paper with uncut edges and the plates on a cream coloured paper which makes me suspect that the original version may have been on Japanese vellum, a favourite affec- tation of the 'nineties but alas now unpro- curable. The binding is of pale blue boards with a printed paper label, both of which are highly susceptible to finger marks but genuine enough and a suitably sober dress for the more scabrous contents. One very slight cavil is the limitation number, which is crudely stamped and could have been precisely penned in some characteristic violet ink—surely not too great a labour for 515 copies.
The `solander case', however, would have made Dr Solander himself, that great botan- ist and companion of Captain Cook, throw up his hands in horror. Constructed out of malevolently puce coloured cloth, lined with red flock like a tart's boudoir and the title crudely blocked with the unaccountable juxtaposition of the dates 1896 and 1967, it is an unmitigated disaster and an offense to the eye.
The illustrations themselves are ribald rather than obscene, full of Swiftian jokes about farting and chamber pots in a jungle of luxuriant pudenda and alarmingly dis- proportionate genitalia. They are without exception full of good humour and, unlike so much of Beardsley's work which is sadly introspective, even morbid, these plates are jolly and unrestrained. Amidst the clutch- ings and fumblings of Beardsley's Athenian ladies, I particularly like the over-excited cupid dexterously applying a powder puff— best badger hair from the Royal Opera Arcade no doubt—to the ample posterior of a lady in frilly slippers and very little else. It is hard to believe that such harmless and well intentioned illustrations could have been suppressed for so long, and produced with bated breath from under the counter by commercially bent pornographers. Thankfully one can now enjoy them on their own terms.
For those with an academic turn of mind, the original drawings for Lysistrata were made at, of all unlikely places, the Spread Eagle Hotel, Epsom, in July 1896 and were first exhibited, from the collection of the late R. A. Harari, at the V and A's Beardsley retrospective in 1966. May they be cherished and enjoyed by their future owners.
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