From The Nation: Review of The Yellow Book

To do something new seems to have been
the principal aim of the publishers of ‘The
Yellow Book; An illustrated Quarterly’ (Lon-
don: Elkin Mathews & John Lane; Boston:
Copeland & Day), vol. i. of which, for April,
1894, lies before us. It is bound in boards of
a hideous yellow color, with a design, only
more hideous than frivolous, in violent black.
The pictures (for they are not illustrations and
have no connection with the text, but are in-
troduced for their own sake) are of the latest
school of English impressionism, and are very
slight or very affected or very vulgar. The
page is a broad 12mo, and the lines of letter-
press, in old-faced type, run straight across it,
with old-style catchwords. The matter is, much
of it, very modern and very impressionistic,
the Whistlerian affectations of Mr. Max Beer-
bohm‘s “Defence of Cosmetics” being par-
ticularly intolerable. The names of Henry
James, George Saintsbury, and Edmund Gosse
among the writers, and that of Sir Frederick
Leighton among the artists, give, however, a
somewhat higher tone to the table of contents,
and Mr. Arthur Waugh’s essay on “Reticence
in Literature” is a healthy protest against
many of the vices of “modernity.”