Description
The signed limited edition of Ghastly Good Taste; or, a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture by John Betjeman.
Quarto, xxviii, 112pp. Quarter black leather over brown cloth, title stamped in gilt on spine, green endpapers. Housed in the publisher’s near fine slipcase.
One of 200 numbered copies, this being number 40, signed by John Betjeman on the limitation page.
(Peterson A2a)
Designed by Sebastian Carter, with Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s folding “The Street of Taste or the March of English Art Down the Ages” bound in at rear.
First published in 1933, Ghastly Good Taste was Betjeman’s first prose book, a satirical and polemical defense of Victorian and Edwardian architecture against both modernist taste and shallow antiquarianism.
This 1970 edition is the revised and expanded issue, with the author’s annotations and new introductory material.
