Oracles from the poets: a fanciful diversion for the drawing room
A drawing-room fortune-telling amusement edited by Caroline Howard Gilman, in which verse quotations from English poets serve as oracles, published by Wiley and Putnam in New York and London in 1845 for genteel parlour readers. The pictures are square woodcut initial letters set in foliate scrollwork, some reserved in white against dotted black grounds, others drawn in open outline on cream paper, giving designers a small alphabet of decorative capitals, vine borders and stipple textures.
