In the early decades of the twentieth century anyone with even the most modest education would have known of Edward FitzGerald and his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. As Bradford Torrey summarised the situation in his article on FitzGerald in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900: ‘All the world reads Omar Khayyám and praises FitzGerald.’

Copies of the poem were readily available from publishers both large and small, as were a substantial number of parodies and a wide range of Omariana, including calendars, cigarettes, figurines, china, silverware, jewelry, watches and flour. Not since the appearance of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) had a literary work found such broad-ranging interest beyond the boundaries of literature. By 1900 a cult of sorts with Omar and FitzGerald as the focus existed on both sides of the Atlantic, but what has yet to be clarified is the seminal role that American reprint publishers played as they first responded to the public's interest in the Rubáiyát and then contributed to the spread of the cult. These enterprising publishers offered the public a range of inexpensive reprint editions of FitzGerald's poem and in the process developed clever marketing strategies that continue to this day. The impact which they had on the cultural acceptance of the Rubáiyát cannot be overestimated, and the purpose of this essay is to shed light on how this happened.