first edition
1945 · New York
by Jones, Idwal
New York: Prentice Hall, Inc, 1945. Octavo (21 x 15 cm.), 184 pages. Subtitle from the jacket, designed by Edgard Cirlin. FIRST EDITION. A classic novel of the professional chef, chronicling his education in various kitchen arts through a sequence of cooking jobs in the great (fictional) restaurants of the Continent. Of the many amusing anecdotes is "an account of a Pleistocene banquet, at which the guests ate musk-ox beef a million years old that had been found frozen in a terminal moraine above the Arctic Circle" (from the jacket). The author, a Welshman transplanted to California, was a longtime San Francisco journalist and novelist. M.F.K. Fisher provides a long jacket blurb which states, in part, "Everything Idwal Jones writes is charged with a special tantalizing flavor, a kind of exotic earthiness, and High Bonnet is to my mind the most magical of them all." Internally clean and sound in publisher's burgundy cloth. In a price-clipped dust jacket with wear to extremities. Fine in a near very good dust jacket. (Inventory #: 10001)
