Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of _The Yellow Book_ developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes--to answer in the pictorial realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have fired a publisher. _The Yellow Book_ quarterly, however, was a very different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth Club, founded the much discussed _Yellow Book_.” This quarterly, to be called _The Yellow Book_ after the conventional name of a “yellow back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each number--not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the one on the other.