WAUGH, Evelyn.

Decline and Fall.

An Illustrated Novelette

Stock Code

106908

London, Chapman and Hall, 1928

£8,500

The author's first novel, with his own illustrations, the dust jacket also designed by him. After the book was rejected for indecency by Duckworth (the publisher of his earlier biography of Rossetti), Waugh offered the manuscript to Chapman & Hall, but he did so while his father, who was the managing director of the firm, was away on holiday. The acting-director agreed to publish the novel and Arthur Waugh returned to London to discover that his son was his firm's newest author. When Arthur Waugh's biography was published three years later, however, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, the two novels published under his directorship of Chapman & Hall, were not mentioned.

From the library of Carl Winter, an art historian and museum curator at the Victoria & Albert and the Fitzwilliam Museums. Together with Patrick Trevor-Roper and Peter Wildeblood, Winter gave evidence (anonymously as 'Mr White') to the Wolfenden Committee,

Description

First edition, first impression (with the names 'Martin Gaythorn-Brodie' and 'Kevin Saunderson' unchanged on pages 168-69; 8vo; frontispiece and 5 plates by the author. Publisher's red and black, snakeskin cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the Waugh-designed dust jacket. Spine a little rolled, very light spotting to the fore edge, and excellent copy in the somewhat rubbed sand sunned dust jacket with some trivial loss at two corners. Importantly the title lettering on the the spine is entirely legible. Uncommon thus.