English Dolls' Houses of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries (signed by Graham Greene)

London: B.T. Batsford, 1955.

Inscribed Presentation copy from Graham Greene, signed by him, "For Mr and Mrs Jack Rubens who have shown such a kind interest in the Rotunda from the husband of the Author, Graham Greene". Rubens was Greene's accountant. First Edition. Quarto. 224 pages, 148 illustrations. Original gilt lettered red cloth, lightly soiled at head of the spine intruding slightly onto the boards, with the heavily chipped dust-jacket, with loss in two places.

Vivien Greene's first published work, the book is credited with persuading dealers and museum curators that dolls' houses were a serious field of study and thus required conserving. Greene (née Dayrell-Browning, 1904-2003) was a considered the world's leading expert on dolls' houses. Her notes record 1,500 such houses that she examined in North America, Europe and South Africa. In 1962 she added the Rotunda (mentioned in Graham's inscription above) onto a doll's house museum in the grounds of her home outside Oxford, incorporating the spiral staircase from St James's Theatre. The museum was part-funded by Graham and opened by Albert Richardson, who later donated a dolls' house. By the mid-1990s the Rotunda could boast new fewer than 50 miniature castles, cottages and manor houses, all furnished with incredible intricacy down to the tiniest piece of porcelain. She was married to Graham Greene for twenty years from 1927 in which time they had two children.