Ghastly Good Taste

John BETJEMAN

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Item#: 111434 price:$350.00

Ghastly Good Taste
Ghastly Good Taste

"PERHAPS WE ARE RUSHING TOWARDS ANNIHILATION. IN THAT CASE THERE WILL BE NO ARCHITECTURE AT ALL. FOR ME THAT IS THE MOST SATISFACTORY SOLUTION."

BETJEMAN, John. Ghastly Good Taste, or, a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture. London: Anthony Blond, (1970). Small quarto, original half black calf, original slipcase. $350.

Signed limited second edition of Betjeman's first book on architecture, number 37 of only 200 copies signed by Betjeman with a nine-foot long folding plate at the rear.

"For the second edition of this book, in an introduction entitled 'An Aesthete's Apologia," Betjeman offered a lengthy account of the circumstances behind the writing and publication of Ghastly Good Taste. He explained that 'wrote the book thirty-eight years ago. I was twenty-six, in love, and about to be married… I am appalled by its sententiousness, arrogance and the sweeping generalisations in which it abounds. The best things about it are the fancy cover, which I designed myself from display types found in the capacious nineteenth-century premises of Stevens, Shanks & Sons… The real point of the book was the Street of Taste, or the March of English Art down the Ages, specially drawn by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, with traffic to match. The pull-out was also an old-fashioned thing to do, and the style of architectural caricature was deliberately based on Pugin's caricatures in his book Contrasts (1836). This pull-out is what caused people to buy the book, and looking back at it, I regard it as far less modish and much more balanced than that'" (Peterson A2). Peterson A2.c.

A fine copy.

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