The first Emily Post post -- Garbo

 guest room pic

 I've accumulated a few moderately vintage books over the years, and now need to figure out what use to make of them. None are the kind of thiung Goodwill has room for on the shelf. Therefore I have decided to utilize some of them for the Wednesday "Books & Authors" segments. 

I'll begin with a 1924 edition of Emily Post's 627-page tome Etiquette. 

My copy doesn't have a dust jacket.

 

This is the eleventh edition of Etiquette. I looked around online and found an image  of the dust cover for the twelfth edition of the "Blue Book."

 

 

 The first edition of Emily Post's famous  book was published in 1922. I  see from the lengthy list on the  copyright page that Etiquette was wildly popular in the 1920s. Etiquette went through multiple printings in just those couple of years. 

The combination of soft old paper and fading old ink make the page scans a bit of a challenges, so I've included a couple of highlights after each image.

"For a wedding anniversary celebration the year of the wedding and the present year are usually stamped across the top of the invitation."

"Capitals R.S.V.P. are permissible, but fastidious people prefer 'R.s.v.p.'"

Suggestion for wording a letter which includes an invitation: "Of course everything is always so beautifully done at everything you give, I wonder I have the courage to ask you to dine with me."

 

Post also has some ideas about what to write in a letter, to whom, and why:

"Admonitions from parents to their children may very properly be put on paper -- they are meant to endure, and be remembered."

 

Over the years, sales of Etiquette have slowed. Did Miss Manners de-throne Emily Post? Are fancy manners for fancy folks, and we no longer have a middle class aspiring to move up socially? Do we just live in The New Age of Rudeness? I'm not sure.  But though there will never be the flurry of re-printings the book had in the years 1922 to 1924, there is still demand for Etiquette. The seventeenth edition was published in 2004, the eighteenth in 2011, and the nineteenth came out in 2017. I'm assuming there with be a twentieth edition next year, since 2022 will be the hundredth anniversary of the first edition.