English Eccentrics

Edith Sitwell. Dust jacket design by Pavel Tchelitchew.

Faber and Faber. London. 1933. First edition. Hardback, octavo; green cloth-bound boards, gilt title to spine, top edge gilt, dust jacket. Publisher's review slip and book advertisement loosely inserted. 332 pages. Jacket design reproduced as a frontispiece on matching green paper stock; 15 hors texte b&w plates. English. 230 x 155mm. 0.7kg. . Very good, in good dust jacket; light shelf wear, slight spotting to fore-edge; light wear to folds, forecorners and spine ends of jacket, a few short 1cm tears, ruffling to head of spine, spine faded, not price-clipped.

'The author would like to express… her sense of the honour conferred on this book by the magnificent cover drawing by Monsier Pavel Tchelitchew.'   Edith Sitwell, herself an English eccentric, brings together an appreciative selection of unusual character's from England's history. The book is scarce in its original dust jacket by Pavel Tchelitchew. Sitwell was a patron of  Tchelitchew and he painted several portraits of her. The book inspired an opera of the same name, premiered in 1964 and with music by Malcolm Williamson and a libretto by Geoffrey Dunn.

[Further reading: National Portrait Gallery, 'The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s', 1994, no. 4.17]