Item 67: Max Beerbohm's copy of Zuleika Dobson (1911)

The protagonists of Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson—the narcissistic Zuleika, the dandified Duke of Dorset who kills himself because he cannot have her, and the lemming-like undergraduates who follow the fashion he sets for suicide—are all unlovable comic characters. Nonetheless, this is, as the subtitle indicates, an Oxford love story. It is Beerbohm’s romantic tribute to the university where he had been enrolled at Merton College in the early 1890s, though he never finished his degree. Also a labor of love was this copy of the novel, which Beerbohm filled with elaborate drawings of the fictional figures, including the slyly cat-like Zuleika, as well as self-caricatures.