Description
136 pages with signatures, comments and original illustrations in a blue morocco album with delicate gilt tooling, tooled with the inscription Boriani's Autograph Book from November 1903 (although the signatures continue until the early 1920s), 17 x 22cm, including the signatures of J.M. Barrie, Stanley Baldwin, Mabel Russell, Arthur Steel, Luisa Tetrazzini, Charles H.E. Brookfield, Gladys Cooper, H.G. Wells, Ellen Terry, William Gladstone, Ernest Shackleton ("This day three years ago we reached the Furthest South. The food was difficult and the nearest girl 2700 miles away."), Alexander Montgomery Carlisle (a designer of the Titanic), Sir Henry Rider Haggard, Fridtjof Nansen, Gerald du Maurier, Sarah Bernhartd, Gustav VI of Sweden, A.A. Milne and Adeline Genée, and original illustrations by Bernard Partridge (showing a young woman) and Frances Dodd (illustrating the restaurant)
Footnote
Note: Boriani was the proprietor of the Pall Mall Restaurant, above London's Haymarket Theatre. In 1914, "The Gourmet's Guide to London" wrote about Boriani and his co-owner, Pietro Deguili: "They are both - Deguili, small, neat and dapper, M. Boriani broad, wearing a curled-up moustache and looking like a tenore robusto - always in the restaurant at meal-times...and giving personal attention to every member of their clientele". Boriani's autograph book testifies to his good relationship with clients (he had previously been head-waiter at the Carlton hotel). Several of the signatures have been countered or answered by comments from other diners at the restaurant, and some are signed directly to Boriani. Several of the pages have been augmented with typed, tipped-in notes explaining the signatures and the exchanges between the restaurant's clientele.