1 / 12
Books - Fine Bindings
The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh, 1st edition
Title The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy. Author Evelyn Waugh Printer / Publisher Chapman & Hall Place of Publication London Edition 1st UK edition Format 8vo Binding Bound by Asprey in full oxblood morocco, the covers with a gilt double fillet; spine with five raised bands flanked by a gilt pearl roll and ruled in gilt, lettered direct in the second and third compartments; all edges gilt; gilt-tooled turn-ins, signed ASPREY in gilt at the lower edge of the front turn-in; combed bouquet-pattern marbled endpapers in crimson, brown and cream. Collation First English edition, the title page undated as issued. 8vo (approx. [190 × 125] mm). [xi], 144 pp. Features Illustrated throughout by Stuart Boyle: pictorial title, frontispiece, full-page line drawings and decorative initials. Date [1948] Condition Fine and unrubbed, the gilt bright; text block clean.
Waugh’s Hollywood book, and the sharpest thing he wrote at novella length. He had gone to Los Angeles in early 1947 to negotiate the film rights to Brideshead with MGM; the negotiation collapsed, but a tour of Forest Lawn Memorial Park gave him something better. He wrote to his agent that he was entirely obsessed by Forest Lawn, and the result was Whispering Glades — the mortuary as total institution, embalming as liturgy, the euphemism as a complete moral universe.
The publishing history is unusual. The complete text appeared first in the February 1948 issue of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon; the American book edition followed from Little, Brown in the summer; British book publication came only in November — the single occasion on which an American edition of a Waugh novel preceded the English one. This is therefore the first English edition rather than the first appearance in print. Waugh had given Connolly the magazine rights for nothing, in recognition of Horizon’s precarious finances.
Chapman & Hall issued the book in two forms — this trade issue (originally in blue cloth) at 7s 6d, and a signed limited edition of 250 copies at 42s. Asprey of Bond Street 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.