Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$944.24 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: 8vo. Publisher s original printed green/grey wrappers. | The fragile wrappers, including first and last pages, with some weak foxing. Small surface rupture to first two lines of lower wrapper. Very few tiny nicks to edges, including one closed tear in outer margin of upper wrapper. | The first separately printed work of Oscar Wilde. With this poem Wilde received the prestigeous Newdigate Prize.
Seller: Antikvariat Bryggen [ILAB, NABF], Skjeberg, Norway
Price: US$1500.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Octavo, 16pp. First and only issue, with the Oxford crest on the front wrapper and title page (there were pirated editions that lacked these). A nice, sound copy, internally lovely, with the original grey-green wrappers expertly backed onto sympathetic archival paper. Overall very good or better. A fragile publication, and among the most elusive of Wilde volumes. The Newdigate Prize, awarded since 1806, is given to the best composition in English verse by an undergraduate student at Oxford. A strong effort right out of the gate from the short-lived but highly influential Anglo-Irish writer. Mason 301.
Seller: Cleveland Book Company, ABAA, Rocky River, OH, U.S.A.
Price: US$1949.98 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: First Edition With Th Crest With A Very Good Shape Hardcover Who Origen Is Unknown Original Grey-Green Printed Wrappers Presents Some Scription In Pencil Stating Is The First Edition Please Check Pictures.
Seller: Libreria Babel, Caracas, Venezuela
Wilde, Oscar. Ravenna. Thos. Shrimpton and Son, London, 1878.
Price: US$2240.00 + shipping
Description: First Edition. With crest on wrapper, title page, and with woodcut on the last page. Wilde's first book. Wilde's poem was the Newdigate Prize winner for 1878, presented at Oxford University for best poetry. "During a vacation ramble in 1877 [Wilde] started from Greece, [and] visiting Ravenna by chance on the way, he obtained material for a poem on that ancient city, and singularly enough, Ravenna was afterwards given out as the topic for the Newdigate competition." (Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England, as quoted by Mason, pg. 243). 8vo. 16pp. Mason, pg. 241. Very good in original gray-green printed wrappers which are a bit browned at edges and with a few small chips. Now housed in a custom chemise and green morocco-backed slipcase.
Seller: Nelson Rare Books, ABAA, Haddonfield, NJ, U.S.A.
Price: US$2244.83 + shipping
Description: First edition of Wilde's first independent publication, an attractively bound copy preserving the original wrappers, and with the bookplate to the front pastedown of the eccentric sportsman and artist William Eden (1849-1915), father of future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and who, like Wilde, had a dispute with the artist James McNeill Whistler. The inspiration for Wilde's prize-winning poem came on a "vacation ramble" to Italy in 1877 with the precentor and junior dean of Trinity College, Dublin, William Mahaffy. According to the review published the next day in The Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate's Journal Wilde's recitation of it at Oxford was "listened to with rapt attention and frequently applauded" (Ellman, p. 94). Eden excelled at a range of sports from boxing and horse riding to shooting, "the epitome of the sporting squire" (ODNB), a member of several clubs and well known in London society. So too was he a keen amateur artist and aesthete, building a fine collection of paintings, and was a member of the aristocratic group The Souls. The contrast between the sportsman and the aesthete has been noted: "There was little that was harmonious in his nature, and the aesthetic side warred with and exacerbated, rather than complemented, his athleticism, making him a bored sportsman and a militant aesthete. As he grew older, the world's failure to correspond to his ideals drove him to furious rages and the debased taste of humanity confirmed his atheism - for how could a God have made such a botch of things?" (ibid). His dispute with Whistler was occasioned when Eden commissioned a portrait of his wife, which Whistler executed, but then kept the cheque without handing over the painting, leading to a legal case which resulted in Whistler's book The Baronet and the Butterfly (1899). Wilde too had a lengthy rivalry with Whistler, out of the courts, but with very public sparring. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987); Mason 301. Octavo, 16 pp. (176 x 119 mm). Early 20th-century pink straight-grain morocco for Hatchards of Piccadilly, spine lettered in gilt, pink cloth sides, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, pink silk page marker; bulked with 20 binder's blanks. With the original green printed wrappers bound in. Spine lightly sunned, very light rubbing at extremities, short split at foot of front wrapper; an excellent copy.
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom
WILDE, Oscar. Ravenna. Oxford: Thos. Shrimpton and Son (1878). 8vo, 1878.
Price: US$2500.00 + shipping
Description: The first edition of Wilde's first work published in book form and the winner of the Newdigate Prize Poem competition in 1878 that was awarded to students at the University of Oxford for the Best Composition in English verse. "During a vacation ramble in 1877 he started for Greece, [and] visiting Ravenna by chance on the way, he obtained material for a poem on that ancient city, and singularly enough âRavenna' was afterwards given out as the topic for the Newdigate competition" (The Aesthetic Movement in England by Walter Hamilton, 1882). The subject was to be confined to the study of the ancient Greek and Roman remains of architecture, sculpture, and painting that was to be written in heroic couplets. Wilde's success was announced on June 10 and advertised in the Oxford University Gasette (viii, 293, p. 451) on June 18th. In the same issue it was announced that the winners will recite their prized entries at the Hall of New College. "One of the Professor's [of Poetry] duties is to suggest textual improvements to the Winner of the Newdigate. The amendments proposed are usually accepted with gratitude; but there have been exceptions to the rule. Shairp suggested many improvements in Oscar Wilde's Ravenna. Wilde listened to all suggestions with courtesy and even took notes of them, but he went away and printed the poem without making a single alteration in it" (The Academy, February 17, 1906). Mason 301. Foolscap 8vo. Original publisher's printed wrappers (slightly toned at edges, else fine); folding hardcover chemise. Provenance: George Cukor (bookplate on chemise).
Seller: Elysium Books, Norwich, VT, U.S.A.
Wilde, Oscar. RAVENNA. Newdigate Prize Poem. , 1878.
Price: US$2500.00 + shipping
Description: [the fine Bradley Martin copy] Recited in The Theatre, Oxford, June 26, 1878. Oxford: Thos. Shrimpton and Son, 1878. Original grey printed wrappers. First Edition of Oscar Wilde's first book, the Newdigate Prize-winning poem that he wrote while a student at Magdalen College. To quote from Pearson: He [Wilde] left Oxford in a blaze of glory. The subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem that year was Ravenna, and it so happened that he had visited the place on his way to Greece [the year before], noting it as a theme for poetic treatment. He could therefore put in bits of local colour which the other competitors had to glean from books. He won the prize, as John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold had done before him, and declaimed the poem in the Sheldonian Theatre on June 26, 1878. When the Professor of Poetry, J.C. Shairp, whose duty it was to suggest textual improvements to the winner of the Newdigate, advised certain alterations, Wilde listened with due courtesy, took careful notes of every suggestion, but went away and printed the poem exactly as he had written it. In this copy the slip "PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN" is affixed to the title verso. This is a remarkably fine copy of this very delicate piece (light browning as usual around the edges of the wrappers, but no wear). Though not really as scarce an item as one might expect for a first effort, this is THE copy for condition (and for provenance -- see below). Mason pp 241-249. Housed in a morocco-backed slipcase with inner chemise. Provenance: bookplate of H. Bradley Martin on the case's chemise. To this day, the eight-part Bradley Martin sale of 1989-1990 remains the sale of a generation, especially for the remarkable condition of his collection (for this item see lot #3320).
Seller: Sumner & Stillman [ABAA], Yarmouth, ME, U.S.A.
Wilde, Oscar. [Wilde, Oscar] Ravenna. Thos. Shrimpton and Son, Oxford, 1878.
Price: US$2500.00 + shipping
Description: First edition. 12mo. 16pp. Original grey-green printed wrappers. Exceedingly scarce first edition with the publisher's printed crest appearing on the cover of the wrappers as well as on the title page and a vignette woodcut appears on the last page. The prestigious Newdigate Prize, Oxford's top award for poetry, dates to early 1800's and the winner for 1878 was the young Oscar Wilde. The pamphlet was issued in the same year, as was common with many of the early prize winners, and is considered Wilde's first publication in book form. He worked on the poem a few years earlier while touring Greece as a student at Oxford. An exemplary copy, with no wrinkling or central creases as was commonly seen from folding to place in a pocket. Very small nick out of two corners, very slight (barely detectable) browning to covers, else extremely clean and bright. 16pp.
Seller: Nudelman Rare Books, Seattle, WA, U.S.A.