The Englishmans Suit

[kilted2000]

I just bought (online) The Englishman's Suit by Hardy Amies. I have heard this book talked about on this forum before.
This is my question. A hardcover version was about $200 while my softcover was $16. It is 114 pages long not including the index.
How can this price diference be? Did I get a great deal or and abriged version?

[India Mail]

The high price will be for possessing an out-of-print hard-back first edition, by Quartet books. It is a Classic. I expect you have the 2009 reprint pbk. The former's pagination is:

x, 116 p, [16] p of plates : ill, ports ; 23 cm. ill. on lining papers.

where "ill" means illustrated, "ports" means portraits are included in the illustrations, 23 cm. is the height of the spine, and the pages of plates are un-numbered, but are of 16 in number. The lining papers are the heavy paper pages pasted to the inside of the boards (covers) and first page of the text-block (pages), sometimes marbled in older volumes.

The reprint might not have the lining paper illustrations to reduce costs, but I doubt you are missing text. The Title Page Verso (t.p.v.) with all the publisher's details, reprint dates, &c., _should_ say if the text has been edited.

Hope this reassures you.

[marcelo]

Since it was nearly impossible to obtain a copy of “The Englishman’s Suit” by Hardy Amies, I opted last year for the German translation, bearing the same illustration on the hard cover as the English edition. The German edition is still in print for a quite reasonable price. It also contains a 6-page preface, absent in the English edition, which Amy himself wrote in German. He spent part of his early learning years in Germany.

Some time ago I posted in another thread this excerpt from an interesting article on Amies’ own understanding of English style.