Grace Kelly

Jenny Curtis’s Grace Kelly is a biography of Grace Kelly, listed in the catalog as published in 1998 by MetroBooks of New York. The Google Books record gives the fuller title Grace Kelly: A Life in Pictures and a length of 100 pages. The search snippet in that record calls it a “sumptuous volume” and says its subject “charmed the world with her elegance.”

In the catalog it sits between Robert Lacey’s Grace (1994) and Wendy Leigh’s True Grace (2007), with no other Grace Kelly title listed in the years between them. Marjorie P. K. Weiser’s biography of 1970 has the same plain title, Grace Kelly, so the author’s name separates the two.

For fans

What the library records say

The records disagree on the date. The catalog gives 1998, Open Library records a Metro Books edition published in 1999, and Google Books gives 2002, with the name Barnes & Noble Books appearing in its snippet. Open Library files the book under five subjects: Portraits, Motion picture actors and actresses, United States, Princesses and Biography.

Beside the other books

The catalog lists 15 other books about Kelly, 12 of them earlier than the 1998 date and 3 later. It classes 14 of the 15 as biography, as it does the Curtis book. The exception is James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987), listed as a memoir. Curtis has no other title on that list.

Wikipedia describes Howell Conant’s Grace (1992) as a book of photographs he took during her years as Princess of Monaco. The Open Library and Google Books records for the Curtis book name no photographer. Wikipedia’s bibliography for Kelly includes Lacey, Leigh and Donald Spoto but does not list Curtis. Neither library record carries a review, and little is recorded about how the book was received.