Beschreibung
A decent copy, with the dustjacket, which is hardly ever seen without tears and bits missing and other signs of shelfwear and handling. Two reasons: 1) the jacket was an end-of-wartime product; 2) this is a book that has always attracted people, because Cecil Beaton's main interest in China was in its people, seen as if on a vast theatre set. As he writes in his Introduction: "Perhaps from scrutinising these pictures you may be able to recognise the fact that, in all Chinese people, the element of Drama is instilled to the very marrow - witness the minute children pretending to be asleep, or plying a fan, the seller of feather dusters posing in the sunlight, the young archers and sportsmen with the gestures of ballet dancers, and the sentry stopping the oncoming traffic with every fragment of his body." Part of the interest of this book is to judge for oneself how much Beaton's generalising tendency towards "all Chinese people" is contradicted by the individualities of his pictures. Anyway, the dustjacket has been repaired on the reverse and is now in a smart protective sleeve, but as you can see from the pictures supplied, it does have some marks, and wears and tears, and small areas of loss, as is usual. The jacket has been price-clipped on the inner front flap. The book itself is spotted in varying degrees towards the end and front, and around the outer edges. The photographic plates, because they are printed on better paper, are clean with only occasional small spots and marks. The binding is getting tender between pages 14 and 15 but is otherwise still good and sound. The yellow boards are a bit foxed around the spine, the area near the top of the spine and along the outer edges but generally they are bright and pretty good. The book contains nearly 110 photographs, including the frontispiece, taken when Beaton was sent to China by Britain's Ministry of Information during World War Two, or as he notes, during China's "eighth year of war against aggression" - since Japan invaded in 1937. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 000763
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