The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Unknown Year Dodge Brown Decorated Pages Edition

This copy, although from the Dodge Publishing Company, bears striking resemblance to this 1900 H.M. Caldwell Co. edition. The page decoration, interior content, and cover emblem look pretty much the same to me. However, the cover is completely different material wise, the flyleaf is plain, and the interior decorations are more green-y than gold in this edition. The two editions look palette swapped in a weird way. It’s very interesting that they are this similar yet have such striking differences.

The main difference, of course, being the cover. This cover is a brown, sort of leathery, suede substance. It looks like it has this sort of leaf-like texture on the cover. The cover of my copy is pretty much disintegrating. The brown smeared off onto the pages I was photographing on and looks like it’s chipping away in bits. Not sure what’s happening with it.

I am also not sure what year this copy comes from and if it was before or after the H.M. Caldwell Co. edition that looks so similar to it. A mystery…for now.

I purchased this copy off of a website visitor, thank you!

The Book Itself

It contains the biographical preface, Andrew Lang’s poem, the Omar Khayyam text, the fourth edition text, plus notes. The notes section had a title page, but the photo I had of it was blurry and I didn’t want to take it out to retake it due to the deterioration.

The Poetry

Same comments as the H.M. Caldwell Co. edition: The text over the decoration is a little hard to read sometimes.