Osbert Lancaster's Cartoons, Columns and Curlicues: Including Pillar to Post, Homes Sweet Homes and Drayneflete Revealed

A beautiful boxed-set containing three long out-of-print and influential books by the great British humorist, Sir Osbert Lancaster

Pillar to Post, the story of architecture through the ages, takes us in words and pictures from the Egypt of the pyramids to Twentieth Century Functional (by way of Stockbroker's Tudor and By-Pass Variegated). First published in 1938, it was described by Gavin Stamp as "One of the most influential books on architecture ever published." Homes Sweet Homes, first published in 1939, is a history of architectural interiors, and a sequel to Pillar to Post. It gives full scope to Lancaster's genius for showing people in their settings: the carousing Normans in the communal hall; the cocktail-drinking couple in Curzon Street Baroque; the First Russian Ballet lady outstretched on her day bed; the Cultured Cottage couple in their Arts & Crafts Interior. First published in 1949, Drayneflete Revealed traces the development of one particularly typical (invented) English town. Starting from its muddy Saxon origins—the Fleet River is the ancient river that runs in sewers under the City of London—it follows the changing fortunes of the architectural development from village to small city and the foibles and fashions of the inhabitants.

Sir Osbert Lancaster (1908–1986) was a painter, a writer, a cartoonist, a theater designer, an authority on architecture and design, and above all a great British humorist. His pocket cartoons depicting the aristocratic Maudie Littlehampton, her family and friends, which appeared in the Daily Express for 40 years, recorded in his inimitably English way the life, news, and opinions of the period. His books on architecture and design were as witty as they were authoritative: in them he depicted buildings and interiors with an unerring instinct for the minutiae of stylistic change and recreated with irrepressible humor the way of life of the original inhabitants.