Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Eleventh-century Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam composed more than one thousand quatrains, or rubaiyat, on love and mortality, expressing an enigmatic theology that has been interpreted and disputed over the course of centuries. The scholar Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), the first translator and author of five separate English versions of the Rubaiyat, did not produce strict translations so much as loose transmogrifications of the poetry, often taking great liberties with the original Persian text; nevertheless he remains the most famous of Omar Khayyam’s translators, credited with bringing the Rubaiyat to broad public notice in the English-speaking world. Sangorski and Sutcliffe, the famed London binders founded in 1901, produced the legendary Great Omar, an extravagant jewelled binding of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat completed in 1911 after nearly two years of meticulous labor. Encrusted with over a thousand precious stones, heavy gold inlays, and Sangorski’s signature peacock designs, it was regarded as the most sumptuous binding ever created. Consigned to the Titanic in April 1912, it was tragically lost at sea, leaving behind only a handful of photographs and an illuminated manuscript as witness to its brilliance.