The Best Families: The Town & Country Social Directory, 1846-1996 - Hardcover

Town and Country magazine has focused its stylish eye on American Society (with a capital S) for one hundred and fifty years. Beginning in 1846 as a large newspaper-style publication, the journal gradually evolved into the colorful, elegantly designed magazine that it is, perfectly tuned to its audience.
Celebrating the anniversary of the magazine's founding, this book brings together a wealth of intimate details about America's first families - from Acheson to Zimbalist - gathered from its pages by social historian Jerry E. Patterson. He has selected nearly 2,200 paragraph-length quotations from more than 5,000 issues of the magazine.
In addition to these brief glimpses into the past filled with facts, family histories, gossip, and other social tidbits, and arranged alphabetically, Patterson has written twenty-three longer biographies of some of America's most significant families.
Illustrated with black-and-white portraits of many of the subjects drawn from the magazine, the book concentrates on text, giving a generous A-to-Z of socially prominent names. Each entry is dated and bears the flavor of the time it was written, from courtly nineteenth-century prose to today's snappier style.