First edition, large paper issue. Number 2 of only 20 copies printed on hand made paper. Author's presentation copy, inscribed beneath the limitation, "for Andrea Cowdin from Evelyn Waugh with warm thanks for the thousand ways in which she made the going very good in Hollywood 1947". Bound on behalf of the author for presentation in half red morocco, with raised bands, lettered in gilt to the spine and top edge gilt.With a two page autograph letter from Waugh to Cowdin. Tipped in colour frontispiece of a portrait of the author by Henry Lamb and one fold-out map. A near fine copy, with a little wear to the joints.

The recipient was the wife of John Cheever Cowdin, the head of Universal Pictures. Waugh and his wife had just spent a couple of months in California as a guest of MGM, who wanted to make Brideshead Revisited into a film. Waugh had no intention of agreeing to this, but wasn't averse to an all expenses paid trip to California during the British winter. Andrea Cowdin met the Waughs through Simon Ewles, an English portrait painter and acquaintance of Waugh's, and proceeded to take them under her wing. Reflecting on the American trip in his diary, Waugh wrote, "Our lives in Hollywood changed greatly with the arrival of the Elweses. Their hostess, Andrea Cowdin, appointed herself our hostess for all practical purposes. We lunched or dined there every day, went with her to parties and met all the most agreeable people at her house.'
The accompanying letter, dated 6 April 1947 and unusually affectionate by Waugh's usual acerbic standards, touches on this in apologising for his hasty departure,
"We left at 2 minutes notice. While I was accepting your invitation to cocktails a MGM man was waiting to tell me he had got a cabin.
An enjoyable voyage with many of your friends on board."
Waugh also provides some bibliographic information on the production of the large paper edition,
"When you offered me the American edition of 'When the going was good' to sign I said I could so you something better. Looking at it now I am not so sure that I can. Except for the binding - which is all right - this isn't the fine edition I had hoped for but it is the best we can do over here at the moment.'

This passage clearly demonstrates that Waugh commissioned the binding and also that, despite the trade edition being issued at the end of 1946, the large paper edition was not ready until the following year and clearly Waugh had not seen it until
he returned from America.
He goes on to mention his mention working on Love Among the Ruins, inspired by his visit to Hollywood,
"America seems a distant dream and I am hastily setting to work on a novelette cemetery life before it fades completely."
When the Going Was Good collects edited selections from the author's early travel writing: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-two Days and Waugh in Abyssinia.

Stock ID: 40232