Oscar Wilde’s singular masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, rendered a decadent and devastating tale of the marks one’s deeds leave on his soul, and has shocked and enchanted readers for 120 years. Heavily censored before its publication in magazine form, and in turn censored again before publication as a book, versions of the novel have since been published as untouched by editors’ pens, but never before has the earliest known manuscript, in Oscar Wilde’s own autograph, filled with the struck-out paragraphs he wrote but dared not print, been made available to the public.
Now from SP Books, comes The Picture of Dorian Gray (September 2018), a limited edition reproduction of Oscar Wilde’s original manuscript in his own handwriting. Complete with a foreword by Merlin Holland (the Oscar Wilde scholar and the writer’s grandson), an iron gilded cover, and 14 x 10 slipcase of the finest materials, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a treasure for readers and aspiring writers alike, as it presents a never-before-seen look at Oscar Wilde as freed from society’s eye: the masterpiece in its unaltered original state.
SP Books is an independent and acclaimed publishing house specializing in the publication of limited facsimile editions of manuscripts from some of history’s most renowned authors such as Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Jean Cocteau, and Charles Baudelaire. In 2016, SP Books launched in the UK with the “fair copy” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre held in the British Library, while last year saw the release of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In 2018, they released Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein and W.A. Mozart’s last musical diary, entitled Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke, or Catalogue of My Works. SP Books has brought several of its limited editions to the U.S., beginning with Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby in 2017, and will follow this year with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Frankenstein, and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.