The most luxurious book in history?

“When the Titanic went down on the night of April 14 1912 in the sea off the New World, its most eminent victim was a book…” French-Lebanese author Amin Maalouf may have been stretching it a bit in his 1988 historical novel Samarkand. Or not, depending on whom you were to ask at the time. The book in question was a fictional manuscript of the Rubáiyát (Quatrains) by the 11th-Century Iranian polymath Omár Khayyám, prized because it was the only one in existence. In fact, a plethora of copies of the volume of Persian poems existed. There was, however, at the time the Titanic made its ill-fated voyage, one that outshone them all – not in terms of what was written within, but rather, its almost otherworldly appearance. It was this very real manuscript that served as the inspiration for Maalouf’s acclaimed novel. “At the bottom of the Atlantic there is a book,” he writes in its introduction. “I am going to tell you its history.”

‘Whoso desireth a peacock must endure the trials of Hindustan’, says a popular Persian proverb. While this particular one refers to the Iranian monarch Nader Shah Afshar’s sacking of Delhi and looting of the famed Peacock Throne (amongst other things) in the mid-18th Century, it might just as well have been coined a few centuries later in London. With a desire to revive medieval traditions of bejewelled bookbinding, George Sutcliffe and Francis Sangorski were renowned throughout the city in the early 1900s for their opulent and over-the-top designs. Accordingly, it was to them that Henry Sotheran’s, a bookstore on Sackville Street, went to commission a book like no other.