author
Mortimer Delano de Lannoy
1869–1920
An American writer and editor best remembered for books on gentlemanly dress, etiquette, heraldry, and family history, he moved easily between social advice and painstaking reference work. His surviving titles offer a vivid glimpse of late 19th-century ideas about manners, lineage, and cultivated living.
1 Audiobook
Simplex Munditiis, Gentlemen
by Mortimer Delano de Lannoy, Reginald Harvey Arnold
About the author
Born in 1869, Mortimer Delano de Lannoy was an American author and editor whose published work ranges from etiquette to genealogy and heraldry. He is best known for Simplex Munditiis, Gentlemen (1891), written with Reginald Harvey Arnold, a guide to dress and social customs for men that reflects the polished codes of its era.
He also worked on more scholarly projects. The Bibliography of American Heraldry (1896) shows his interest in heraldic research, and he served as editor for the heraldic and historical sections of The Genealogy, History, and Alliances of the American House of Delano, 1621 to 1899 (1899). Contemporary family-history material describes him as active in genealogical and heraldic circles in New York and in European societies devoted to the subject.
Although not widely known today, his books preserve a very specific world: one fascinated by ancestry, ceremony, and the rules of correct appearance. He died in 1920, leaving behind work that still appeals to readers curious about social history and the culture of refinement in the Gilded Age.