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Books - Fine Bindings
Brideshead Revisited
The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Title Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. A Novel. Author Evelyn Waugh Printer / Publisher Chapman & Hall Ltd Place of Publication London Edition 1st edition Format 8vo Binding Bound by Asprey in full crimson morocco, the covers panelled with a gilt double fillet; spine with five raised bands ruled in gilt, lettered direct in the second and fourth compartments and dated at the foot; all edges gilt; gilt-ruled board edges and turn-ins, signed ASPREY in gilt at the lower edge of the front turn-in; combed marbled endpapers in red, brown and cream. Fresh and unrubbed, the joints firm and the gilt bright. Collation 304 pp. Printed under wartime restriction, the title verso with the Authorized Economy Standards conformity notice, the Tonbridge Printers imprint, the G. & J. Kitcat “Flexiback Binding” statement, and Cat. No. 5010/4. Date 1945 Condition Binding fresh and unrubbed, the joints firm and the gilt bright. Text block clean and bright, with no yellowing or foxing.
Waugh’s most celebrated novel, and the one he came to regard with the most ambivalence. Written on sick leave from the Royal Horse Guards in the first months of 1944 and issued the following year under severe paper rationing, Brideshead appeared first in a small private printing for the author’s own circulation; this Chapman & Hall issue is the first edition offered to the public, and the first appearance of the text as Waugh’s readers encountered it.
It is not the text most readers know. The revisions of 1959–60, undertaken for the Uniform Edition and prefaced by Waugh’s own apology for the book’s gluttony of language, pruned much of the elegiac excess that had made the novel a phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. A 1945 copy preserves a materially different novel from any later printing, and the unrevised first-edition text remains the object of most serious critical attention. The Author’s Note is characteristic and disarming: “I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.”
Asprey of Bond Street, better known for silver and dressing cases, sold fine bindings throughout the twentieth century, commissioning the work from the London trade and, from the late 1970s, owning Sangorski & Sutcliffe outright. This binding belongs to that retail programme: restrained, precisely executed, deliberately conservative.
$2,500