The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers book

The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers book is a 1972 book about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers by Arlene Croce, whom Wikipedia’s Astaire entry names as a dance commentator. Open Library records the edition from W.H. Allen and Ebury Publishing at 191 pages. Its subject headings include motion picture musicals, dance and dancers. They name Rogers alongside Astaire, so the record files the book under the two performers and not under Astaire alone.

Of the 14 other books about Astaire listed in the catalog, only one is older: Astaire’s own memoir, Steps in Time (1959). Croce’s book appeared one year before Stanley Green’s film history Starring Fred Astaire (1973). It appeared four years before Michael Freedland’s Fred Astaire (1976), the earliest of the 10 other titles the catalog lists as biographies. The only other listed title that names Rogers is George Baxt’s The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers murder case (1997), which the catalog lists as a novel.

For fans

The library records

The records differ by edition. Open Library gives W.H. Allen and Ebury Publishing, 1972, and 191 pages. Google Books lists a New York edition from Vintage Books, dated 1977, at 204 pages. The bibliography in Wikipedia’s Astaire entry cites a third imprint, Galahad Books, with the date 1974. Open Library’s subject list also includes musical films, biography, dance in motion pictures and television, and motion picture actors and actresses.

Croce in the Astaire record

Wikipedia’s entry on Fred Astaire groups Croce with the commentators Hannah Hyam and John Mueller, who ranked Rogers as the greatest dance partner Astaire had. It adds Hermes Pan and Stanley Donen as holding the same opinion. The entry describes a more neutral stance from the film critic Pauline Kael, and it quotes Richard Schickel of Time, who wrote that nostalgia for the pair tends to “bleach out other partners.” Astaire gave his own answer in 1976, telling the British talk-show host Michael Parkinson that Rogers was “the most effective partner I ever had.” The entry does not say which of Croce’s writings holds her view, though it lists the 1974 Galahad edition of this book in its bibliography. Neither the Open Library record nor the Google Books record gives a description of the book’s contents or a reviewer’s notice.