Portrait of New York

[Cecil Beaton]

'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.'



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 good dust jacket; light shelf wear to jacket, some rubbing to edges and forecorners, a short 3cm tear at head of spine with residue of tape repair to verso, small area of loss to rear lower forecorner, toning to spine, browning and spotting to verso of jacket, price-clipped; slight offsetting to endpapers, no inscriptions.