8vo. vi, 247pp, [1]. Original publisher's orange cloth, lettered in black. Without dustwrapper. Extremities marked and a trifle rubbed, spine sunned. Endpapers browned, occasional spotting.

The first edition of politician Sir Harold George Nicolson's (1886-1968) peculiar amalgam of memoir and fiction, providing sketches of nine invented characters in Edwardian England. Virginia Woolf praised the book as a harbinger of a new attitude toward biography: '[Nicolson] has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary...He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds'.