CRISP, Quentin. Colour in Display. London: Blandford Press. 1938.
8vo. Publisher’s green cloth, upper board and spine lettered in black, in the publisher’s price-clipped black and red-orange jacket printed in white and black; pp. 131, [1 (blank)], 4 colour plates and numerous black-and-white diagrams in the text, folding colour chart at end; a few nicks to jacket; some spotting to edges of textblock; a very good copy; occasional pencil marking or underlining, bookplate of Cecil. C. W. Landale to front pastedown, loosely inserted advertisement for J. Barcham Green’s ‘Pasteless Hand Made Boards’.
First edition of the first book authored solely by queer icon Quentin Crisp, a ‘lucidly explained’ treatise on the use of pictorial art in backgrounds and colour gradation is displaying goods.
Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt, 1908–1999) had co-authored in 1936, with Albert Frederick Stuart, Lettering for Brush and Pen, a calligraphic manual for advertisers. In the present work, Crisp, then working as a freelance designer for advertising and publicity companies, argues that the mistake of the window designer is to confuse ‘commercial art’ and ‘fine art’ with the art of display. Crisp gives readers much practical and witty advice such as ‘the desire to display something of everything seems to have resulted in the display of nothing’.
Later the subject of Sting’s Englishman in New York and author of the pioneering 1968 memoir The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp self-described as a ‘flamboyantly effeminate homosexual’, and in the posthumously published autobiography The Last Word declared that ‘at the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, I'm transgender. I now accept that’, expressing regret that gender-affirming surgery had not been more readily available in her youth.
SKU: 2122795