Brian Howard. Portrait of a Failure

Edited by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster. Introduction by Maurice Richardson.

Anthony Blond Ltd. London. 1968. First edition. Hardback; blue cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. xx, 639 pages. Hors-texte b&w plates. English. 235 x 160mm. 1.2kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; light wear to jacket, small tear at base of spine with some creasing, ruffling to head of spine, small 1cm area of loss at top edge of front panel, scratch to rear panel, some yellowing to jacket, price-clipped, bookseller's price sticker to front flap; slight spotting to top edge.

A scarce first edition of the biography of Brian Howard, one of the wittiest and most complex of the Bright Young Things. Howard was at Eton and Oxford; he was a poet, a practical joker and a magnificent party host. Evelyn Waugh may well have based his character of Anthony Blanche on him. Sadly he never achieved success with his poetry and his life ended with suicide in 1958. The biography includes reprints of several of Howard's poems. From the library of theatre designer David Collis, with his dated signature in pencil to front endpaper.