WAUGH, Evelyn, Decline and Fall, An Illustrated Novelette. London: Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1928.

You can view this item on our website here: http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/rare...

Presented by Ben Houston from Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Octavo. Original red and black marbled cloth, gilt lettered spine. With the dust jacket. Illustrations by Evelyn Waugh. Spine slightly rolled; an excellent copy in the jacket with faded spine.

First edition, first impression. The author’s remarkable first novel, with his own illustrations, in the dust jacket also designed by him. After the book was rejected for indecency by Duckworth’s, the publisher of his earlier biography of Rossetti, Waugh offered the manuscript to Chapman & Hall, but he did so while his father, who was the managing director of the firm, was away on holiday. The acting-director agreed to publish the novel and Arthur Waugh returned to London to discover that his son was his firm’s newest author. When Arthur Waugh’s biography was published three years later, however, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, the two novels published under his directorship of Chapman & Hall, were not mentioned. The indelicate material, which Martin Stannard has since revealed in fact did go through some “taming” revisions, was perhaps too much for the elder Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, first edition, 1928.    • Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, first...