Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam. Hardcover: Very Good+ New York: Random House, 1947. Edited with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer. Housed in a red box case. Originally published in 1859. Art illustrations for this edition were done by Mahmoud Sayah.

Omar Khayyam (1048-1122) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who was not known as a poet in his lifetime. These verses lay in obscurity until 1859, when FitzGerald published a free adapation of this Persian poetry. As a result, The Rubaiyat became one of the best-known and most often quoted English classics.