"Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books concerns Wilde's obsession with the visual appearance or "look" of his published writings. It discusses the author's working relationships with a number of graphic designers and their influence on Wilde's texts. Nicholas Frankel approaches Wilde's writings as graphical or "printed" phenomena that reveal their significance through the beautiful and elaborate decorations with which they were published in Wilde's own lifetime.

With extensive reference to and exposition on Wilde's theoretical writings and letters, Frankel shows that, far from being marginal elements of the literary text, these decorative devices were central to Wilde's understanding of his own writings as well as to his "aesthetic" theory of language. Extensive illustrations support Frankel's arguments.".

"This book will appeal to specialists of Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siecle, to textual and literary scholars, art historians, and linguistic philosophers interested in the graphical nature of the linguistic sign."--BOOK JACKET.