The Devil Wears Prada (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

WEISBERGER, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate pasted to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Lauren Weisberger (b. 1977) graduated from Cornell University in 1999 and went directly to work as a personal assistant to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue — a position she held for approximately a year before moving on to Departures magazine and then to writing. The Devil Wears Prada, published in 2003, was her first novel. It spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into forty languages, and was adapted into a film in 2006 — directed by David Frankel, starring Meryl Streep as the fearsome Miranda Priestly and Anne Hathaway as her hapless assistant, grossing USD $326 million worldwide. Weisberger's books have sold more than thirteen million copies worldwide.

The novel is a roman à clef — a fiction whose architecture and characterisation are drawn so directly from life that the original of every principal figure is immediately legible to anyone with passing knowledge of the American fashion industry. Miranda Priestly is Anna Wintour; the Runway magazine is Vogue; and Andrea Sachs, the narrator, is a fictionalised version of Weisberger herself. The premise is classic comedy of manners: an intelligent young woman from outside the charmed circle enters it, discovers that its values are entirely different from anything she has been prepared for, and must decide whether the access and glamour are worth the debasement required to obtain them. Weisberger renders the world of high fashion with the precision of genuine insider knowledge — the brands, the hierarchies, the particular cruelties of a workplace organised entirely around the whims of a single supremely powerful woman — and with a comedy that is funnier for being rooted in experience rather than imagination.

The novel's cultural afterlife has been substantial. Miranda Priestly as portrayed by Meryl Streep — cold, brilliant, and devastating in a single raised eyebrow — has become one of the most cited examples of screen villainy of the twenty-first century. The source novel retains its own audience entirely independent of the film.

Very good. Some loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting to edge gilt. Contents otherwise fine.

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Catalogue Number: HH000609