On yellow, again

[Mark Kohut]

Reading another book, I read this about Aldous Huxley's allusive titles:
   
  'Chrome Yellow' is not a direct literary allusion, but evokes Oscar Wilde and the scandalous 
  'Yellow BooK'.......(Of course, I pretend to remember as vague memories stir)....
   
  Cyprian has alluded to Oscar Wilde before....and this was a movement.......and such lascivious books came wrapped in yellow paper, as would Cyprian when he remeets the Prince....
  Yellow Book    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  
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  This article is about the literary journal. For other uses, see Yellow book (disambiguation).
         
The Yellow Book, with a cover illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.


  The Yellow Book, published in London from 1894 to 1897 by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland, was a quarterly literary periodical (priced at 5s.) that lent its name to the "Yellow" 1890s.
  It was a leading journal of the British 1890s; to some degree associated with Aestheticism and Decadence, the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of paintings. Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor, and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its association with French fiction of the period. He obtained works by such artists as Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer. The literary content was no less distinguished; authors found within its pages during the three years of its existence include:
    
   Max Beerbohm   
   Arnold Bennett   
   "Baron Corvo"   
   Ernest Dowson   
   George Gissing   
   Henry James   
   Sir Edmund Gosse   
   Richard Le Gallienne   
   Charlotte Mew   
   Arthur Symons   
   H. G. Wells   
   William Butler Yeats 
  Though Oscar Wilde never published anything within its pages, it was linked to him because Beardsley had illustrated his Salomé and because he was on friendly terms with many of the contributors. Moreover, in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to amuse him after the suicide of his first love. This "yellow book" is understood by critics to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a representative work of Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes like Beardsley. Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to alert the reader to their lascivious content.

   
       
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