On the evening of 13 October 1892, at Pagani's Restaurant in London's West End, a small group of men gathered to celebrate the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. At this inaugural meeting of the Omar Khayyám Club, and for years to come, the group came together to eat, drink heavily and praise the poet Omar Khayyám and his English translator Edward FitzGerald as ‘twin souls’, separated by time and place but united in the Rubáiyát text. The poem's mystique spread among friends and acquaintances, and eventually led to the formation of another group in Boston in 1900. This exclusive club welcomed a variety of male professionals, including artists, literati, scholars and political elites, who joined together not only in their admiration of the Rubáiyát but ‘on the basis of good fellowship as well as Oriental learning’.

On the surface, the Omar Khayyám Clubs, or O. K. Clubs, as they came to be known, sanctioned an escape from everyday life, a controlled environment where men could indulge in material pleasures, following what they saw as the Rubáiyát's hedonistic philosophy of living for the moment. On a deeper level, the Clubs became ritual spaces in which participants praised their own elite status as well as crafted and maintained a coveted identity through the vehicle of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald's inauguration of the Rubáiyát in the West, the poem's delayed popular reception and its persistent connection to the East provide insight into the Clubbists' curious allegiance to a book of verse.