A Look Inside Cecil Beaton's Scrapbooks

Yes, the legendary photographer kept scrapbooks, like the rest of us...






Only Beaton's multiple scrapbooks are packed with snapshots and magazine clippings of society figures, royals, dancers, actors and statesmen taken during his long career as a photographer for publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Assouline on Nov. 22 is coming out with a 400-page coffee table book -- called Beaton, the Art of the Scrapbook -- that replicates some of the pages.

The blurb: "Composed of his own prints and clippings from magazines, newspapers, and playbills, the pages are an instructive record of his creative process....To flip through the pages is to enter a fabulous and surreal party where Tallulah Bankhead rubs shoulders with a bust of Voltaire and a portrait of Stravinsky; where Beaton's first trip on the Queen Mary coincides with Queen Elizabeth's coronation. Beaton's scrapbooks allowed the artist to play with pictures he had taken (and perhaps those he wished he had) in the dreamspace of artifice that was always his favorite setting."

Something to add to the Xmas list!