[Counterculture] Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book

London: Michael Joseph, (1954). First English edition. 8vo. xi, (i), 288 pp. With black and white illustrations by Sir Francis Rose. Publisher's tan buckram, stamped in green and in gilt; top edge stained green; in original unclipped pictorial dust-jacket, lightly worn and toned; pictorial endpapers.

Lot includes a copy of the first American edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954; price-clipped dust-jacket).

A handsome copy of the first English edition of Alice B. Toklas's cook book, featuring artist Brion Gysin's notorious recipe for "Haschich Fudge" on p. 259. "Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day) This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by 'un évanouissement reveillé.'” This recipe was suppressed in the first American edition that was published only a few days after the first English.

This lot is located in Philadelphia.

Provenance

From the collection of Justin G. Schiller