My scrapbooks : inspirational and personal reflections from leading ladies of style

The celebrated designer's latest book, devoted to gleaning design inspiration from the personal scrapbooks and notebooks of great women of style-including her own.

Interior designer Charlotte Moss has spent years collecting as well as creating scrapbooks-a pastime both meditative and instructive about her own ideas regarding design and style.

In this unique book, Moss brings together her own scrapbooks along with those of notable women, both contemporary and historical, whose flair for style inspires us, including interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and society doyenne Gloria Vanderbilt-all never before published. Organized by theme-home, garden, travel, entertaining, and fashion-each chapter includes examples of Moss's signature style mingled with excerpts from the scrapbooks of these great women.

From the ambassador's wife and bon vivant Evangeline Bruce, we learn that she preferred accessorizing tabletops with simple florets of broccoli in biscuit tins. And from the iconic Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we see her notes and menus from the legendary White House dinners she threw.

One piece (among many) of sage advice includes perfecting one extraordinary meal and serving it again and again, rather than experimenting endlessly.