Patchwork Child, Signed Presentation from Brooke Astor to Albert Hadley
[Signed Presentation to Albert Hadley] Astor, Brooke. Patchwork Child, Early Memories. First Edition. 1962. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition—jacket shows repaired edge tears and rubbing. Book is inscribed on the flyleaf, “To Albert Hadley, with all good wishes, Brooke Astor, November 7, 1962.”
Long before she became New York’s most celebrated philanthropist, Brooke Astor was an only child growing up in an globe-traveling military family. As the daughter of a naval officer, she spent her youth in Imperial China, Hawaii, Panama, and Washington, D.C., experiences that fostered both intellectual curiosity and a lifelong love of reading. As a young girl she found herself discussing Buddhism with monks at the Temple of One Hundred Courtyards outside Peking, the sort of experience that might seem improbable in the childhood of a future society grande dame. This memoir of her early years is charming in its own right, but it also serves as a revealing prologue to the remarkable life that followed. The inquisitive, adventurous child who emerges from these pages is unmistakably the woman Brooke Astor would become. [Albert Hadley, to whom this copy is signed, designed the red lacquer library in Brooke’s Astor Park Avenue apartment.]
“Although I am a child of the twentieth century, my background and childhood are so foreign to the life of today that in describing them I seem to be stealing pages from a nineteenth-century novelist.”
--Brooke Astor