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Omar sells – American advertisements based on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, c.1910-1920

Omar sells – American advertisements based on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, c.1910-1920. Michelle Kaiserlian.
Early Popular Visual Cultur, 60 (2008), nr. 3, p. 257-269.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when modern advertising grew in response to a burgeoning consumer culture, American stores displayed products tied to the name of Omar Khayyám. Motivated by Omariana, the intense response to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that contributed to an outpouring of illustrated editions, literary parodies, musical scores and dramatic productions, advertisers found a market ripe for Omar-related consumables and ephemera.

William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’

William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’. Michaela Braesel.
Apollo (2004), (February)

Braesel discusses the manuscript designs by the British artists William Morris (1834-96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1893-98) for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám which was translated in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald. The author notes that two copies of the manuscript can be differentiated by Burne-Jones’s involvement in the designs, details Morris’s biographer Mackail’s account of the colour scheme adopted for the patterns in the manuscript, and compares the second version of the `Ynglings’ manuscript with patterns on the London manuscript for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. She notes Morris’s interest in designs featuring female musicians, traces the history of the small manuscript format, and examines Morris and Burne-Jones’s reasons for avoiding illustrating the dramatic segments of the text.