The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Ward Lock, 1891. First Edition, Limited Issue. Publisher’s rough grey bevelled boards, upper cover with gilt lettering atop a pattern of fifty-five gilt butterflies (designed by Charles Ricketts), rebacked in velum with title lettered in gilt; original endpapers. Boards scuffed & rubbed with fading to the original gilt on upper cover. Spotting to preliminary leaves, the body of text generally clean & bright throughout. Housed in collector’s solander box.

One of 250 Large Paper Copies Signed & Numbered by Oscar Wilde (copy number 53) Printed on Dutch hand-made paper, watermarked Van Gelder.

The rare signed limited issue of Wilde’s only novel—the most desirable collector’s format of the work that scandalised Victorian London and became a foundational text of aestheticism and Gothic fiction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray began as a novella in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890, provoking outrage for its implied homoeroticism and hedonism. Wilde revised and expanded it with a new preface and six additional chapters for the first book edition which was published in April 1891. The limited signed edition was published approximately three months after the trade issue.

Dorian Gray stands alongside Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula as a defining fin-de-siècle text exploring the split between public respectability and private desire.

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