Merton College Caricature Album

Oxford, England, 1899-1904. Half Leather. Very Good. Madcap "salad days" from back when! 4to. 30 by 25.5 cm. Unpaginated, 20 pages with caricatures mounted onto card rectos. Additional blank card, and a number of drawings that are loose, some of which were probably always so. In total, 91 separate pieces of overwhelmingly, caricature, of varying size, and ranging from simple portraits, exaggerated in one way or another as called for by the medium, to multi-character cartoons, or depictions of a scene, with dialogue bubbles and captions. The caricatures center around, but are not confined to, the doings and personalities of Merton College, Oxford. A few of the portraits would appear to be of Theodore Roosevelt, for example. Many, but far from all, of the mounted caricature illustrations are signed or credited, although we think it is quite likely that pseudonyms were used, as was obviously the case with "the Freak". The album is quite unusual, then, in its creation, with multiple contributors, something common in a friendship or amicorum album, which this decidedly is not. We would surmise that the contributors were members of an informal club of artistic anarchists. The quality is not entirely even, as might be expected from such an effort, but overall, the caricatures are vivid and amusing, with quite a few displaying true artistic cleverness. Rebacked in matching calf. Wear to the corners and edges. Some scrappiness to interior. Paste marks where there once were a few mounted pieces.