The Drama is filled with knowledge about the
Victoria period without even opening the book. The text is written on a small
portion of the page with lots of white space, which shows that the owner of
this copy was very wealthy. The pages are also manually cut because of the
gather. This is called deckled edges. These books would come printed
uncut and the buyer had to manually cut them. The
text itself is written by Irving to describe personal experiences as an actor
and to give advice to someone perusing a career in acting. “The cardinal secret
of success in acting are found within, while practice is the surest way of
fertilizing in these germs,” says Irving. He explains you cannot be taught how
to be a great actor. While there are schools for acting, you must have the endurance
on your own as well. This piece was very similar to Stage Confidences in the
way that it did not play up the profession of the theater and did not make it
overly glamorous. The edition is limited to only 300 copies. Each copy is
signed and number, of which this is number 177. This means that this book was
probably expensive and hard to come by. The
Drama is a cloth bound with gilt decoration of the outlined face of Henry
Irving, the author, on the front cover. The spine and front and back covers are
stained. Before the title page, there is an illustration. This is called a frontispiece.
My first impression of this book was very boring. There wasn’t much detail to
the bindings or the cover pages. However, I found that the simple details
provided information about its time.
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