Portrait of New York

Cecil Beaton.

B.T. Batsford Ltd. London. 1948. Revised edition, first thus. First published in 1938 under the title 'Cecil Beaton's New York'. Hardback, octavo; grey cloth-bound boards, red title to spine, top edge red, dust jacket. viii, 136 pages. Over 100 hors-texte b&w photographs and line-drawings within the text. English. 230 x 160mm. 0.5kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; slight shelf wear to jacket, light wear to forecorners and spine ends, slight rubbing to forecorners, not price-clipped; no inscriptions, slight lean to spine, slight spotting to top-edge.

'My book is... less a guide-book than a catalogue of impressions, mostly visual, of a city that, with each visit, becomes for me ever more beguiling, mysterious and impressive.'
 
Beaton wrote Cecil Beaton's New York before the war and it provided a witty and glamourous snapshot of Manhattan in the 1930s. He had spent much of his time in New York during this period as a photographer for Condé Nast. The book captures the city he experienced - it's style, exuberance, diversity, people and culture. Beaton's photographs and illustrations complement the text. This edition, re-titled Portrait of New York, was published 10 years after the original in 1948. The publisher describes it as having been 'so extensively re-written and re-illustrated that it is virtually a new book.'