The Yellow Book: A Fresh Look

BOOK REVIEWS of her forty-one-page Introduction to list his book-length literary works chronologically and to give a brief summary of each and a few comments on its salient themes and critical reception. A reader may wish that Senf had uncovered early reviews of the important but little-known novel Lady Athlyne (1908) and of Snowbound and DracuL·^ Guest. Also Senfs dating of Snowbound must be challenged vigorously. She concludes that the book first appeared Ui 1899 because "the copyright date on the University Microfilms facsimUe edition clearly lists 1899." The UMI facsimUe (1977) which I have seen was published by Collier and bears the statement "Copyright Ui the United States of America by Bram Stoker, 1899 & 1908." Dalby reprints a title page with the imprint, "London/ Collier & Co/... /1908," and he comments that some of the stories "had appeared Ui Collier's Magazine (USA)." Probably the UMI copy is an American edition, and almost certainly the "1899" refers to the separate publication of some of the stories. The 1908 publication date is untformly given by Dalby and by Stoker's biographers, Harry Ludlam (who wrote Ui alliance with Stoker's son) and Daniel Farson, and no 1899 publication is noted Ui such sources as The National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints or The English Catahgue of Books (London, 1835-1968). However, The Critical Response to Bram Stoker is a valuable book for its interesting early reviews and recent commentaries, and for its call for textually responsible , culturally oriented attention to Stoker's canon beyond DracuL·. Alan Johnson ________________ Arizona State University The Yellow Book: A Fresh Look Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition. Cambridge: The Houghton Library, 1994. 64 pp. Paper $10.00 IN THIS CENTENNIAL decade of the 1890s scholarly attention has again turned to that innovative period, notably Ui London in the 1890s: A Cultural History by Karl Beckson and The 1890s: An EncycL·pedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture edited by G. A. Cevasco. For most, the short-lived quarterly, The YeUow Book, is one of the outstanding and lasting symbols of the period. Unfortunately the passage of tune has simplified, distorted, and obscured many of the facts surrounding its origin and existence. The authors of this succinct and meticulously documented study 105 ELT 38: 1 1995 succeed hi setting the record straight, following The YeUow Book from its inception Ui 1893, through its first volume m AprU 1894 and on to the thirteenth and final issue m 1897. Standard sources and important unpublished manuscripts and letters of many of those Ultimately associated with the periodical are used to dispel old myths and, more significantly, to rediscover and reemphasize some of the subtler innovations the quarterly embodied. Staid as it may appear in the late twentieth century, The Yellow Book was revolutionary Ui a number of ways to the late-nineteenth century public. In almost every particular—price, format, quality of production, absence of serials, emphasis on the short story, art work independent of text, the inclusion of women artists and writers, advertising campaigns , the international quality of its contributors—The Yelhw Book clearly set itself apart from other periodicals of its tune. The authors' meticulous scholarship deftly separates the chaff from the wheat, as it dispels certain myths that have permeated previous accounts of this sometimes infamous periodical. For instance they banish the popular, but not scholarly, misconception that Oscar WUde was a shaping force Ui the periodical's inception, proving that he was m no way associated with it, was never a contributor and did not carry a copy of it when he was arrested as has sometimes been stated. The monograph was published Ui connection with the exhibition of Yellow Book related books, manuscripts, art and ephemera held last March at Harvard's Houghton Library to commemorate "the one-hundredth anniversary of the most important and notorious British magazine of the 1890s, the first to market High Culture to mass audiences Ui England and America through modern advertising strategies." In addition to the essay and notes, the booklet contains reproductions of ten of the items in the exhibition and a checklist of all of them...