Slightly Foxed - but still desirable: Ronald Searle's wicked world of Book Collecting.**

UK,slim 8vo HB,1st thus.FINE.No owner inscrptn and minus(?) slipcase or dw/dj - if one was issued? Bright,crisp, clean,matt,wrap-around colour pictorial artwork to a white background by Ronald Searle, illustrated cloth boards with bright,crisp,blocked bronze gilt lettering to front and spine and immaculate plain rusty-brown coloured endpapers; with negligible shelf-wear and creasing to edges and corners - no nicks or tears present - though bottom two corners and head+foot of spine are minisculely bumped.A small dent too to front board's bottom edge - about 1" along from spine's gutter edge.Top+fore-edges bright, crisp and clean; contents bright,tight,clean - really pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corner tips, appears unread - apart from my own collation.UK, slim 8vo HB,1st thus,5-128pp [paginated] includes an introduction by R.S.,58 full-page,full colour cartoon illustrations by Ronald Searle with explanatory text of a book-selling term opposite it and a 4pp glossary; plus [unpaginated] full-page,full colour cartoon frntis with a colour cartoon to it's verso,and title page.Described hard but fairly and honestly - nowhere as adversely affected as it reads!
See my book ID rja616216 for the original,true UK HB+ dw/dj 1st edn; a very,very elusive,SCARCE and highly desirable,collectable edition of Searle's work.A really superb example in a very high grade/condition - simply one of the best I've seen - let alone handled.
As any,even vaguely addicted book collector will have swiftly learned,most bookseller's catalogues are written in a parallel language that can fool anyone but the cognoscenti and which makes mysteries of the Rosetta Stone,or Linear B,look like something out of Enid Blyton. Without a smattering of inside information,the baffled but hopelessly-bitten book buyer is drifting unarmed and unprepared into a minefield whose perilous complexities will usually only be made plain when an eagerly awaited parcel of dream volumes arrives and the mangled contents are revealed in all their deceptive glory . . . But all is not lost.Help is at hand!
After a lifetime of avidly scanning the frequently poisonously-tinted pages of innumerable book catalogues, Ronald Searle has become expert in the art of decoding those esoteric,poetic and usually approximate,descriptions of literary comeons.Now,licking his wounds, he publishes his hard-earned findings in this fully illustrated pioneer guide,designed to foil the devious machinations of scheming and wicked booksellers for ever more.
No longer will the innocent book collector need to puzzle over the finer meaning of 'old half roan','good working copy','blind tooled',or 'tail edge shaved'.The unvarnished truth is here exposed at last,both in the shockingly explicit drawings and in the devastatingly frank glossary whose revelations will startle even the most battle-scarred of bibliophiles.
The result is one of the funniest,most entertaining books to have emerged from the brilliantly perceptive pen of the master.No book collector,and certainly no bookseller,can afford to be without it - even the wicked ones.His last book of the 1980's.
Want more Ronald SEARLE titles? Please search my MODERN FIRSTS,MODERN FIRSTS2,BIOGRAPHY and CHILDRENS/ILLUSTRATED catalogues for other and similar titles.
Ronald William Fordham Searle (b. March 3rd,1920 - d. Dec 30th ,2011.) He was an English artist and satirical cartoonist,comics artist, sculptor,medal designer and illustrator.He is best remembered as the creator of St Trinian's School and for his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the 'Molesworth' series. Works as Ronald Searle.Born in Cambridge.Studied at Cambridge School of Art (1936-39).Served in the Army during WW2 and was interned in Japanese PoW camps in Siam and Malaysia for three and a half years.On his release in 1945,he returned to England with over 300 drawings,many of which were published in 'To the Kwai and Back'.He settled in London and began working as a humorous illustrator and carciaturist for books and magazines,including 'Punch' and 'Lilliput'.In 1959,at the invitation of the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees,he visited camps in Austria,Italy and Greece,and published a book illustrating his impressions.The following year,1961,he moved to Paris and later married Monica Koenig,settling in France, where he lived until his death.Since 1975 they both lived and worked in the mountains of Haute Provence.In 2007 he was decorated with France's highest award,the Legion d'Honneur,and in 2009 he received the German Order of Merit. Searle has illustrated over 60 books.'Hurrah for St. Trinian's!' (1948) was among the first of many giving a mock-horrific view of private schools and their denizens; in these and many of his other books,the predominant mood of effervescent humour is offset by sinister or macabre overtones.
He early developed a fanciful and strikingly individual graphic manner,subjecting the human form to grotesque distortions (bristling brows, hunched shoulders,matchstick legs and stiletto feet) and by the mid 1950s had become virtually a household name in Britain.He succeeds both at character-invention (favouring a number of well-defined types) and at caricature.He is also a painter in watercolour and gouache,etcher and lithographer and has worked on several films including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965).
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