Antique User's Manual
My copy of The Bar Tender's Guide: How To Mix Drinks, by the venerable Jerry Thomas, has just arrived. I'm more excited than usual about this addition to my culinary library, because this is a special book. This 1862 classic, the first widely-read of its kind ever written, is rare and very expensive in its original form. Now Mud Puddle Books in New York has created not just a reissue, but an unusually accurate reproduction, as part of a collection of seminal books now available as reasonable priced alternatives to dusty and pricey antiques. Mud Puddle is a small imprint, and they still don't offer wholesale pricing, so even my favorite purveyors Cask and Omnivore Books have been unable to offer their covetable items on their shelves. I had to order mine directly from Cocktail Kingdom, the site from which I imagine owner Greg Boehm may actually ship the orders himself.
It feels particularly satisfying to hold the original incarnation of an author's work, bereft of the pesky rubber-gloved preciousness automatically conferred upon objects that have become old. Here is a faithful reproduction of not only the expressed thoughts of a 147-year old book, which could easily be extracted and conveyed on a webpage, but also the binding, gilt-embossing, and fine illustrations. As David Wondrich writes in the introductory pages, it is a time machine, putting the reader "back among the pioneers" of the mixological era that was about to be.
No photocopied nonsense here
0 comments:
Post a Comment