Distinguished Company (author's own copy)

New York: Doubleday, 1973.

Author's own copy, signed by him to front free endpaper and with a page of handwritten corrections on his personal letterheaded notepaper laid in, an with corresponding corrections to the text. First American Edition. 8vo. pp 179. Original black boards, gilt lettering to spines. With the unclipped dust-jacket featuring a striking photographic portrait of the the author to front panel. Mustard yellow endpapers; leading edge untrimmed. Photographic frontispiece of the author and b&w photos of the author throughout. Spotting to boards, spine gilt dulled. Light rubbing to extremities of jacket and chips to head of spine. Gielgud's third volume of memoirs, originally published by Heinemann in 1972. Gielgud offers up profiles of many of those he had known and worked with on screen and stage, among them Ellen Terry, Gertrude Lawrence, and Charles Laughton. But he was clearly unimpressed with the American edition, particularly the placing of the photographs. In his handwritten notes, amid cavils about commas and the correction of 'Venice' to 'Vance', all of which are correspondingly corrected by hand.