Footprints, Signed by Brooke Astor to Monroe Wheeler
[Signed by Brooke Astor; Ex Libris Monroe Wheeler] Astor, Brooke. Footprints, An Autobiography. First Edition. 1980. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is warmly inscribed on the flyleaf, “For dear ***, with as always my devotion and gratitude for his friendship. Brooke. June 18, 1980.”
Monroe Wheeler, to whom this copy belonged, will forever be associated with the Museum of Modern Art, while Brooke Astor—society’s final Mrs. Astor—gave her deepest allegiance to its uptown rival, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet their worlds overlapped. Wheeler accompanied Mrs. Astor to the ballet and visited her at Holly Hill, her country house in Westchester. In Footprints, Astor recounts a life that carried her from an exotic childhood in imperial Peking through an unhappy first marriage, a beloved second husband’s early death, and finally to Vincent Astor, the philanthropic heir whose fortune and name she would make distinctly her own.
“As you see, I have turned myself into a sort of Public Monument—a monument in the name of Vincent Astor.”
--Brooke Astor