The Quatrains.: Now first completely done into English verse from the Persian, in accordance with the original forms, with a biographical and critical introduction.

London: Printed for the Villon Society, by private subscription and for private circulation only,, 1898. First Payne edition, deluxe issue, number 560 of an unknown limitation. The translator of this edition, John Payne (1842-1916), was a poet and friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Payne took an interest in limited edition publishing, and co-founded the Villon Society with a small circle of friends in order to publish his translations of the works of French medieval poet François Villon; the Society later published the work for which he is best known, his translation of the Arabian Nights, between 1882 and 1884. When his edition of Omar Khayyám's verse was published, in 1898, a "cult of the Rubáiyát" was beginning to grow in "the Omar Khayyám Clubs of England and America" (Yohannan, p. 202). Octavo. Original japon, spine and front cover lettered in gilt, spine and covers decorated in red and gilt, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, partially uncut. Old bookseller's typed cataloguing slip tipped-in to rear pastedown. A very good copy, spine and covers soiled and rubbed, lightly worn at one tip, endpapers faintly foxed, contents otherwise clean and free from marks. Potter 360; John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America, 1977.