The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde 1956 Limited Edition Boxed Set #289 of 500 Anthoensen Press/New York Public Library - Scarce

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde 1956 Limited Edition Boxed Set #289 of 500 Anthoensen Press/New York Public Library - Scarce

<Condition is Good as Pictured> (normal wear with markings, outer covers and spine are faded/sunned with soiling, visible edge-wear, previous owners bookplate is present inside front covers)

A beautiful limited edition printing of Oscar Wilde's famous comedic play, with plates showing facsimile manuscripts. Limited to five hundred copies on Lee paper at the Anthoensen Press, this being numbered 289. Complete in two volumes. In the original slipcase.

—Volume I ~illustrated with five plates.
—Volume II ~illustrated with facsimiles of the typescripts of Acts I, III, and IV, and the manuscript of Act II.

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James’s Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play’s major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Some contemporary reviews praised the play’s humour and the culmination of Wilde’s artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde’s most enduringly popular play.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in “one of the first celebrity trials”, imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.

The Anthoensen Press was an American publishing company based in Portland, Maine, in operation between 1875 and 1987. It was nationally renowned for the quality of the books it created. It published works for the Limited Editions Club and several educational institutions, including Bowdoin College, Colby College, as well as for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society.


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