The Book of Beauty

Cecil Beaton.

Duckworth. London. 1930. First edition. Hardback, quarto; white paper-covered boards with gilt dot pattern, backed with pink cloth, with gilt title to spine, top-edge pink. xii, 67 pages. Colour frontispiece, 27 hors-texte black-and-white collotype plates and numerous line-drawing illustrations in the text. English. 285 x 230mm. 0.8kg. . Very good; light shelf wear and marks to boards, some wear and rubbing to forecorners; some spotting (mainly to top edge), slight splitting within binding at one point, bookseller's label to endpapers. From the library of Bendor Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, with his ex libris bookplate to front endpaper.

I have tried...to make my book an analysis of modern beauty, a collection of the loveliest ladies I have ever seen, and, in time, it may become a sentimental document for our granchildren, to marvel at all the types of beauty to-day; the latest varieties of Venus as well as the counterparts of former belles.'
 
The Book of Beauty is Cecil Beaton's first book. It is an unashamed paean to the beauty of the women who inhabit his world. The book is inspired by books of beauty published in the Victorian period and by his childhood fascination with the theatricality and glamour of the opposite sex. Photographs of women are accompanied by flowery descriptions. Sitters include Baba and Nancy Beaton, Edith Sitwell, Tallulah Bankhead, Tilly Losch, Nancy Cunard and Lady Diana Cooper. The whole captures the wit, intelligence and spirit of the modern women.
 
This copy from the library of Bendor Grosvernor, 2nd Duke of Westminster. Grosvenor married Leolia Ponsoby in the same year that The Book of Beauty was published; a year in which Beaton photographed Leolia as the glamourous Duchess.