Cecil Beaton's Scrapbook

Cecil Beaton.

B.T. Batsford Ltd. London. 1937. First edition, first printing. British edition. Hardback, quarto; quarter-cloth floral paper boards, matching floral endpapers, without dust jacket. 136 pages. Illustrated throughout with over 350 drawings, collotype photographs and coloured plates on varied paper stock. A frontispiece and tailpiece by Christian Bérard. English. 290 x 235mm. 1.1kg. . Very good; slight wear to binding, light wear to forecorners and spine ends with some rubbing to board edges, slight soiling to yellow cloth spine, torn ex libris bookplate to front paste down, light spotting to verso of rear free endpaper. Ex libris of P.G. Rose, the bookplate with poem and illustration.

'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.' (from the preface).   The Scrapbook is Cecil Beaton's seond 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. This copy with the desirable variant binding that uses floral wallpaper for the boards and endpapers.