Item 10: The Yellow Book (1894)

Julie Carlsen: The Yellow Book is one of the most important periodicals of the 1890s. It's very playful and quite avant-garde. It published the works of unknown writers like a young Max Beerbohm.

The two covers you see here are both drawn by Aubrey Beardsley, who was the art director at the beginning of The Yellow Book. This magazine actually lent itself to the name of the period, which is sometimes called "the Yellow 90s." On one hand, yellow is the color of English Decadence in the 1800s. And at the same time, it's the color of smut published in France. 

French publishers use the yellow wrappers on their books that might have been considered controversial. Sort of as a trigger warning, Dorian Gray—in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—was corrupted by a yellow book, which almost certainly meant some sort of French pornography. So it’s this sort of play between high and low society, kind of simultaneously highbrow, lowbrow. And I think that's exactly what they’re playing with.

Wilde actually detested the Yellow Book magazine, but he was forever linked to it. He was reported to have been carrying a copy of the magazine when he was arrested in 1895, when he was in fact holding a French book bound in yellow wrappers, not unlike the one that corrupted Dorian Gray. This had disastrous effects for the magazine and its staff—Aubrey Beardsley, who had illustrated Wilde’s Salomé in 1891, was fired as a result and the publisher's office were attacked by protesters who threw rocks at the building and broke every window.