Jones, Idwal

High Bonnet. [A novel of epicurean adventures].

New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1945.

Octavo (21 x 15 cm.), 184 pages. Subtitle from the jacket. 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." Near fine, in a very good dust jacket with just a bit of wear to jacket extremities. Inscribed on the free front endpaper in the year of publication, "For Dorothy Robinson, the unruffled and ever-pleasant, and a wonder at finding the needle in the haystack - With warm regards, Idwal Jones, 1945"

Price: $350.00