When the Going Was Good

London : Duckworth, 1946.

First Edition. Original yellow publisher's cloth with the excellent dust-jacket, unclipped, upper section of back panel slightly toned, chipped at corners. 318 pages; colour frontispiece of a painting of the author by Henry Lamb executed in 1926 and folding map of Guiana. Without old inscriptions or other interior markings. A near fine copy. Between 1929 and 1935 Waugh travelled widely and wrote four books about his experiences. In this collection he reports on cruise in the Mediterranean sea, a train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to attend Emperor Haile Selassie's Coronation in 1930, travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo, coping with heat and mosquitoes, a journey to Guyana and Brazil, and his return to Addis Ababa in 1935 to report on the war between Abyssinia and Italy. It was on these trips that he forged the ideas for such novels as "Scoop" and "White Mischief". The five chapters are fragments of the best bits of his travel books Labels (1930), Remote People (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934), and Waugh In Abyssinia (1936).