Cecil Beaton's Scrapbook

[Cecil Beaton]


'On the shelves at Ashcombe, I have now over fifty diaries & scrapbooks, memorials of many violated magazines, repositories of museum picture postcards, theatrical programmes, letters, photographs & pictorial miscellanea which have accumulated since childhood. Christian Bérard suggested to me that a similar scrapbook might be distilled from my own work during the last five years; & that is what has been done.' (Preface).
 
The Scrapbook is Cecil Beaton's second book, published in 1937. Beaton's photographs and drawings, drawn from the author's numerous scrap albums, are collected together and accompanied by witty essays on subjects such as Christmas, Winter House Party, Mrs Simpson: 20th November 1936, Marlene Dietrich, Garbo, Hats, New York, Dubrovnik, The Russian Ballet and Coronation. Scarce with the dust jacket.


Cecil Beaton. B.T. Batsford Ltd. London. 1937. First edition, second printing. Hardback, quarto; yellow cloth-bound boards with title in red to spine, dust jacket. 136 pages. Illustrated throughout with over 350 drawings, collotype photographs and coloured plates on varied paper stock; frontispiece and tailpiece by Christian Bérard. English. 290 x 235mm. 1.1kg. . Good, in very good dust jacket; light shelf wear to jacket, a small 1.5cm area of loss at the head of spine, repaired with clear tape to both sides, short 1cm closed tear to rear top edge, toning to spine, a couple of small repairs to verso with adhesive paper, foxing to rear flap and verso of jacket, price-clipped; some mottling and staining to boards, light offsetting to endpapers, some light spotting to endpapers and title-pages, neat contemporary owner's signature to front pastedown dated 1937; with the dust jacket in much better condition than usual.