The Spirit of Khayyam

Within the torn and ruffled pages of the richly embellished and beautifully illustrated The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, lives not only the enduring spirit of Khayyam, but also the spirit of history - 97 years of it. 

This book, published in 1913, has lived through World War I, Musolini and the fascists of Italy, Hitler and the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the Iron Curtain, Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam War, woman's suffrage, segregation, the race to space, the start of Rock n' Roll, Einstein, apartheid, Babe Ruth, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the Islamic Revolution, so on and so forth. 

Before this book disintegrates into a pile of dust, I pray we manage to do more good than harm.

"Omar was one of the most remarkable, as well as the most distinguished of the poets of Persia, at the latter end of the twelfth century. He was altogether unprecedented in regard to the freedom of his religious opinions; or, rather, his boldness in denouncing hypocrisy and intolerance, and the enlightened views he took of the fanaticism and mistaken devotion of his countrymen. He may be called the Voltaire of Persia, though his writings are not calculated to shock European notions so much as those of the followers of the Prophet.  The priests we his great enemies, and he was peculiarly hated by false devotees, whose arts he exposed. His indulgence to other creeds gave great offense and his liberty of speech drew down upon him continued censure; yet was he extremely popular, and his compositions were read with avidity by those who did not come under the head of bigots, and the admiration of this class consoled him for the enmity of the other..."

- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam