The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Illustrations by Sir Francis Rose.

TOKLAS, Alice B.

Published by London: Michael Joseph, 1954

About this Item

First edition, first impression, inscribed by the author on the half-title, "For Jeanne Coppel, appreciatively, Alice B. Toklas", and signed by the illustrator on the same page with a drawing of a rose. The painter and collagist Jeanne Coppel (1896-1971) was an early practitioner of abstract and surrealist art who lived in Paris from 1919. She studied at Montparnasse's Académie Ranson under the Nabis painters Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Paul Sérusier. Her works featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961. A melange of traditional French recipes and anecdotes of Toklas's life in Paris with Gertrude Stein, the Cook Book is notorious for the "Haschich Fudge" recipe, given to Toklas by Brion Gysin, which was expurgated from the US edition published two days later. The recipe is a variation on the Moroccan confection majoun, which Gysin recommends as "an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected" (p. 259). Octavo. Portrait frontispiece, chapter vignettes, and full-page line drawings, all by Rose. Original tan cloth, spine lettered in gilt on green ground and decorated in gilt, illustrated endpapers, top edge green. With supplied dust jacket. Ink annotation to p. 246. Cloth rubbed, endpapers and outer leaves lightly foxed, contents otherwise clean; jacket unclipped, slightly rubbed and toned, especially on spine, extremities a little worn with tape repairs to verso: a very good copy in very good jacket.

Seller Inventory # 173011

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Illustrations by Sir Francis Rose.
• Publisher: London: Michael Joseph, 1954
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)