Fred Astaire

Sarah Giles’s Fred Astaire is a biography of Fred Astaire, published by Doubleday in 1988 according to its Open Library record. The Google Books record gives the fuller title, Fred Astaire: His Friends Talk. The description in both records, which Google Books labels the publisher’s, says the actor and dancer is presented through “the people who knew him best,” and it lists them as his peers, family and friends.

That description points the book at a reader who wants Astaire described by those around him. The catalog’s list of Astaire books offers two different arrangements. Steps in Time (1959) is Astaire’s own memoir, and the full title of Bob Thomas’s Astaire, the Man, the Dancer (1984) says it carries comments by Astaire. The title of the Giles book names his friends instead.

For fans

The library record

The records disagree on length: Open Library gives 210 pages, and Google Books gives 232. Neither record explains the difference. Open Library files the book under the subjects Dancers, Actors, Biography and Bildband. The cataloging text in the Google Books snippet marks it as a first edition, with the headings Astaire, Fred; Dancers, United States, Biography; and Actors, United States, Biography. Its call number there is GV1785.A83G55 1988. Wikipedia’s article on Fred Astaire lists the book in its bibliography as Fred Astaire: His Friends Talk, with the imprint “Bloomsbury, London: Doubleday” and the ISBN 0-7475-0322-2.

Next to the other Astaire books

The catalog lists 14 other books about Fred Astaire, and 10 of them are older than this one. Those 10 are the 1959 memoir, Stanley Green’s film history Starring Fred Astaire (1973) and eight titles classed as biographies, from Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972) to two of 1987, Tim Satchell’s Astaire and Bill Adler Sr’s Fred Astaire. Of the four later titles, two are novels: Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Dancing in the Dark (1996) and George Baxt’s The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Murder Case (1997). The other two are biographies, by Larry Billman (1997) and Joseph Epstein (2008). The catalog also gives Doubleday as the publisher of Starring Fred Astaire, while Wikipedia’s bibliography lists that book under Dodd. Neither the Open Library record nor the Google Books record names the people who speak in the Giles book or quotes a review of it.