THIS HAPPY BREED. A Play in Three Acts. by Coward, Noel - (1947).

Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc.. Very Good+ in Very Good dust jacket. 1947. First American Edition. Hardcover. Sunning to DJ with chipping and small open tears. Small inkstamp to front pastedown and front flap; Dedicated to Hugh Beaumont, aka 'Binky, ' a London theatrical impresario, not the actor best known as Ward Cleaver. A rare Coward play in that it tells the story of a middle-class family and not the upper crust; 12mo 7" - 7½" tall; 223 pages .

1947. New York, Doubleday & Company, 1947. Original half cloth over light grey cloth-backed boards. Gilt littering to spine and gilt NC to front board. Ex-liberary copy with remains of old paper library label to lower part of spine. Library stamp to free front end-paper and title-page. Internally fresh and clean. First US edition of Coward's famous working class drama.

London: Heinemann, 1943. From the Bart Auerbach Collection. Spine and portion of front cover faded, the latter also spotted. 8vo. Original dark blue cloth. First edition. A dedication copy "To Hugh ['Binkie'] Beaumont, the play's producer, inscribed by the playwright on the front free endpaper: "For Hugh from Noel Coward." (...all Noel's plays had been presented in England since 1939 [and through the war years] by H. M. Tennent Ltd. [which] was exemplified in the attractive, persuasive, amusingly talkative person of Binkie' Beaumont. Violent and occasional business flare-ups excepted, Noel and Binkie were more than friends: they were the deepest, closest cronies..." (Cole Lesley, 'Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward', NY, 1976, p. 287). It was Beaumont who had persuaded Coward to return to the stage to act in a trio of plays - This Happy Breed was one - after the latter's nervous breakdown in 1937. Another dedication copy to Beaumont of This Happy Breed was in the sale of Masterpieces of… Read More