A short list of items chosen for the RareBooksLA Virtual Fair, October 15-18, 2020. The focus is on California-related material, but there is still a wide range of item types: cookbooks (older and newer), menus, photographs , cocktail books, and some works from or about Mexico.
San Francisco: Published by Town Talk Press, 88 First Street, 1916 copyright January 1, 1917. Tall octavo (28.5 x 18 cm.), 47, [3] pages. Illustrated wrappers with envelope fold. Includes the cancel leaf tipped-in at the rear, "Some War Recipes and Others". FIRST EDITION. An early and attractively produced San Francisco cookbook, issued as the city was finally putting the Great Earthquake behind it, but the nation was on the.....
[Los Angeles; San Francisco, California: Lucca, circa 1938]. Six items in all: 1. Photo album, “Photographs”, bound with cord (18 x 26 cm.), [8] pages. Nine original black & white photographs, mounted to album leaves. The photographs depict the exterior of the San Francisco Lucca’s decked out in its grand opening finery; the bakery with staff; the dining room with full front of house staff (and perhaps the owners?); wedding.....
Los Angeles: [The League]; Privately Printed, 1930. Octavo (24 x 16 cm.), [viii], 215, [i] pages. Illustrated chapter heads. Advertisements. Cover title: Los Angeles Junior League Recipes. Editorial attribution from page [3]. ~ Evident FIRST EDITION. One of the earliest documented Junior League community cookbooks in a tradition that would not be firmly established until two decades later. Unusual in the context of charitable books, too, in that an outside.....
[San Francisco]: 1892-1901. Duodecimo, about 50 pages. Manuscript in pencil and ink. Small, blank account book for a dry goods store, repurposed as a cellar book for A J. B. Reveyron, who is identified by Crocker-Langley's San Francisco Business Directory (1899), as a "cellarman" located at 135 Perry Street in San Francisco. The book, written in both French and English, records personal expenses, amounts of wine and spirits moving in.....
[Dumfries]: printed for the author, [circa 1760]. Small octavos in 4s (15 x 9 cm.), 186 pages. FIRST EDITION, though priority not firmly established. MacLean states “another ed. Edinburgh: printed for E. Wilson at Dumfries, [c.1760]” (though that edition is dated, “M.DCC.LX” at the foot of the title page); the Wilson issue has 136 pages. Cagle refers to the Wilson issue as “Second Edition”. Both editions display the misspelled author’s.....
[San Pedro, California: Trade Winds Publishing Co. Inc.; Schindler Printing Company, Inc., 1948. Quarto, stapled in wrappers (26 x 20 cm.), [32] pages. Illustrated. Frontispiece portrait of author. FIRST EDITION. A guide to reading leaves in a tea cup. Illustrated with fifteen images of tea leaves, photographed from above, surrounded by text with the author's interpretation. Includes a glossary of images with interpretations. Some light soiling, and a light tideline.....