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Odd Volumes: Bibliophilia at the Fin de Siècle
UCLA
Fall 2013 Clark Library Exhibit
Ellen Crowell, Guest Curator and Lecturer
A curious bookcase at the back of the Clark Library Reading
Room—virtually unopened for over fifty years—contains an almost untouched archive
of the publications and proceedings of a private London bibliophilic dining
club, The Sette of Odd Volumes. Formed
in London in 1878 by prominent bookseller and collector Bernard Quaritch,
and in continuous operation from 1878 through the 1940s, the group's
name derives from bibliophilic parlance: bound volumes not paired with others
in their "set" were "odd," and thus less valuable than when
united. This exhibit will open up the Odd Volumes bookcase to the public,
showcasing the Clark’s collection of over 1000 rare books, typed and
handwritten letters, original artwork, photographs, and other ephemera
chronicling the history of this literary and artistic society, founded on a
love of book collecting, whose heyday was between 1885 and 1895. By the mid
1880s, the Odd Volumes boasted a
distinguished membership of prominent booksellers, bookbinders, illustrators, poets,
novelists, artists, entrepreneurs, and publishers—a diverse and at times
discordant network of aesthetically-minded gentlemen whose overarching
connection to each other was a passion for books. This exhibit offers a
fascinating glimpse into intellectual, aesthetic and social interactions of an
network comprised of key figures in the cultures of aestheticism, decadence,
and early modernism.
In an accompanying lecture, Dr. Ellen Crowell will
illuminate how this late-Victorian network and its collective preoccupations
dovetail with those of key artists of the long fin-de-siècle. By enlisting Oscar Wilde, a figure key
to Clark Library collections, as a guide through the Odd Volumes bookcase, this
lecture will trace intersections between the proceedings of this bibliophile
club and Wilde’s aesthetic development from 1885 to 1892 and demonstrate how
this stand-alone archive offers scholars new entrance points into the history
of fin-de-siècle literary, visual, commercial and sexual subcultures.
Ellen Crowell is Associate Professor of English at Saint
Louis University. She is the author of Aristocratic Drag: The Dandy in Irish
and American Southern Fiction (Edinburgh, 2007). Other work has appeared in Modern
Fiction Studies, Eire-Ireland, and BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century
History. Her current book project, Oscar Wilde’s Body, reconstructs forgotten
subcultures of mourning, fandom, and queer self-fashioning to reimagine Wilde’s
presence in the literary and cultural landscapes of early modernism.
