John Harrison Stonehouse

Cover of the works of Robert Browning in a Cosway binding No. 915 c.1930 with a miniature by C. B. Currie and signed by Currie and Stonehouse inside.[10]

In 1901 or 1902, Stonehouse introduced what became known as the Cosway binding, a book in a fine binding, in which Sotheran's already specialised, but with the addition of a miniature portrait on the front cover relating to the author or subject of the book.[11] The name came from the 18th-century miniaturist and macaroni Richard Cosway whose work had been the subject of several exhibitions in London in the 1890s.[11]

The books were bound by the Rivière bindery, who already did a lot of work for Sotheran's, and the portraits painted by Miss C. B. Currie (Caroline Billin Curry, died 1940) in oil on ivory.[11] They were protected by a thin glass cover.[12] Currie produced several thousand miniatures during her career with Sotheran's,[13] as well as at least 164 numbered fore-edge paintings for the firm,[14][15] but her identity was kept secret until 1911 when the success of the books was so great that Stonehouse decided to use her as part of the firm's marketing.[16] Similar bindings had been made in 18th-century France and 19th-century America, and a number of competitors copied Sotheran's success, but it was the Cosways from Sotheran's that popularised that style of binding.[11][17]

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (the "Great Omar") bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in 1909-11, and lost with the Titanic in 1912.

In 1909, Stonehouse commissioned the bookbinders Sangorski & Sutcliffe to produce an edition of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. As Stonehouse later recalled, he told Francis Sangorski:[18]

Do it and do it well; there is no limit, put what you like into the binding, charge what you like for it; the greater the price, the more I shall be pleased; provided only that it is understood, that what you do, and what you charge for, will be justified by the result; and the book when finished is to be the greatest modern Binding in the world; these are the only instructions.

The book, based on the large 1884 American edition illustrated by Elihu Vedder, took two years to complete at Sangorski & Sutcliffe's bindery in Southampton Row and included 1,050 jewels of topaz, turquoise, ruby, amethyst, garnets, and olivines. These were set in a binding of 5,000 pieces of coloured leather on a green morocco leather base.[18] Stonehouse named the book the "Great Omar".[19] According to company legend, he once played a prank on Sangorski by hiding the book when they met for dinner, causing Sangorski to think that he had lost it.[20]

Despite the book not being finished, Stonehouse made it the centrepiece of Sotheran's shop display for the Coronation of King Edward VII in June 1911. It was priced at £1,000, more than three times the price of any other single volume offered by the firm at the time. He was confident it would sell as there was already strong demand for jewelled bindings, particularly in the United States, but despite wide publicity it failed to find a buyer.[19] It was refused by the King's librarian at Windsor, who was repelled by it, and Gabriel Wells refused it at £900. In 1912, an attempt to send it to the United States for the viewing of wealthy book buyers there, failed due to customs problems. Finally, Cecil Sotheran, whom Stonehouse had not consulted before commissioning the book, ordered it to be sold without reserve at auction. It came up at Sotheby's in March 1912 and was sold to Gabriel Wells for £405.[21] Wells sent it to New York on RMS Titanic but the book was lost when that ship sank in April 1912.[22] Stonehouse published his history of the book in 1933.[23]

The troubled history of the book and its loss on the Titanic has caused some to view it as "cursed".[24][25] The front cover featured three peacocks, a bird traditionally associated with immortality[26] but in the modern era also with pride[27] and vanity,[28] sins possibly reflected in the commissioning, pricing, and decorating of the book which featured 97 topazes on the cover with a border of 250 amethysts.[19] The back cover showed an innocuous Persian mandolin, but inside the front doublure was a snake (or serpent) in an apple tree, evoking the story of the temptation of Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden which introduced evil into the world, while the back doublure showed a skull with teeth made of ivory.[19] Among the flowers decorating the end pages were poppies and deadly nightshade, the whole creating a theme more of death[19] than immortality. In 1912, Francis Sangorski drowned in an accident, while a later replica of the book created by Sangorski & Sutcliffe was destroyed during the London Blitz.[29]

Cover of the sales brochure for the Piccadilly Fountain Press edition of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1931.

The catalogue of the libraries of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray edited by Stonehouse, 1935.

Stonehouse's personal literary interests centred on the works of Charles Dickens. In 1905, an employee of Sotheran's overheard a man in a hotel bar talking about documents that he thought were by Dickens and would be of great value if only they could be authenticated. Stonehouse became involved as the firm's specialist in manuscripts and found a poem titled "The Bill of Fare" and a number of letters of a romantic nature from Charles Dickens to Maria Beadnell (1811-86, later Mrs Maria Winter), who ultimately married a merchant with better prospects than the unestablished young Dickens.[6] After a number of visits to the owner, a daughter of Maria Winter,[30] Stonehouse managed to obtain 18 letters which he transcribed with notes sufficient to form the basis of a book that for the first time identified Beadnell as the model for Dora in Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield [6] and as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit.[30]

Finding the letters to be unpublishable in England,[30] in 1905, Stonehouse took them and his book manuscript to the United States, hoping to find a buyer. They were refused by John Pierpont Morgan but accepted by the industrialist and collector William K. Bixby of St Louis who also agreed to publish Stonehouse's book. It appeared in 1908 as Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell: Private correspondence, published for the members of The Bibliophile Society of Boston, Massachusetts, with a preface by Henry H. Harper and edited by George Pierce Baker of Harvard University.[6] Despite the book being substantially based on Stonehouse's work,[6] his name did not appear anywhere, the only possible reference to him being in the preface as "one who realized their [the letters] worth".[30]

In 1921, Stonehouse produced editions of Dickens's readings from David Copperfield and Oliver Twist based on the original printed editions, the former including his essay on the relationship between Dickens and Maria Beadnell. The readings from Oliver Twist, titled Sikes and Nancy, included Stonehouse's "A First Bibliography of the Reading Editions of Charles Dickens's Works".[31] In 1930-31, he produced in five parts the biographical Green Leaves: New chapters in the life of Charles Dickens which dealt principally with Dickens's early life and its influence on his writings. It was issued in bound form in 1931. A revised and enlarged edition was published by Haskell House Publishers of New York in 1973. In 1931-32, he provided the introduction for and edited an edition in parts of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (The Pickwick Papers). In 1935, he edited the catalogue of Dickens's library at Gadshill which was combined with the library of novelist William Thackeray in one volume drawn from Sotheran's price lists.[32]