Rabelais was in Boston to exhibit at the 47th Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, sponsored by the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association of America. For the occasion, we assembled a list of one hundred+ exceptional culinary books, manuscripts and ephemeral items. The five centuries of items hail from 1549 to 1999, and include books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, account books, menus, trade cards, labels and more. This time around, our emphasis is on Boston and Massachusetts.
THE FIRST volume in a long-term effort to examine American community cookbooks as well as other cookbooks outside the formal genre that express place and/or community. <br />
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WITHIN THE CATALOGUE, the items are arranged alphabetically by state, and chronologically within each state. This first offering (of what is expected to be six volumes in all) includes one hundred forty-four community books (and others which address issues of place and community) from Alabama through the District of Columbia, nearly one quarter of which are unrecorded.<br />
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A short catalogue of items we will be bringing to the 2019 Bibliography Week ABAA Showcase in New York City. The one-day showcase takes place Thursday, January 24th, from 10-4pm, and is located at the French Institute /Alliance Francaise, at 22 East 60th Street. The catalogue, offered here in no particular order, is mostly newly-catalogue printed and manuscript books and ephemera, all related to cookery.
Our list for the 2018 Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. Highlights include a very rare Dublin printing of the first edition of Susannah Carter's influential Frugal House-wife [circa 1765-68], a set of three photographs of 19th century street food vendors in Athens and Constantinople, a watercolor-illustrated Japanese Wagashi sweets manual, a presentation copy of the earliest known Iraqi cookbook to appear in English, an early and superb Julia Child letter, culinary manuscripts, gastronomic ephemera, and spirited cocktail manuals.
With this, our seventh full-length catalogue, we celebrate the tenth anniversary of Rabelais. In November of 2006, Samantha and I passed a ‘For Rent’ sign in a Portland shop window, spent lunch sketching a business plan on a napkin and, just a few months later in the Spring of 2007 opened Rabelais.
This, our sixth full-length catalogue, consists of things that come in bunches, piles, albums, boxes, folders, envelopes, and the like. Most are groups, collections and small archives of one sort or another. When cataloguing these types of things, I’m always tempted to use the word “convolute” (as a noun), not least of all because of the implication of chaos. But these groups are mostly organized, at least thematically, and occasionally by strict principals. Groups also provide opportunity for discovery, as any collector knows, and we hope you will discover something of interest amongst the crowded pages within, and that you are not overcome with too much of a good thing.
How and when did food production move from the kitchen to the factory? The items in this catalogue seek to illustrate this transformation. Included are printed and manuscript materials produced by and for the food industry: handbooks, trade catalogues, advertising art, labels, photographs, and ephemera. We've divided the catalogue into the primary activities that occur 'between farm and table', stopping just short of the home or restaurant kitchen.
We try hard to offer superior or distinguished copies of food and drink books, well researched, in condition befitting collectors. We hope you find this catalogue a tasty introduction to our books and to our shop.
July, 2011, we headed to New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail, the annual international conference for drink history and craft cocktail creation. We displayed hundreds of rare books on cocktails, drink history, distilling, wine, soda fountains and more.
<p>Our first catalogue of antiquarian titles contains books from the 18th through the 20th centuries, and includes cookbooks, artist’s books, farm and garden books, cocktail manuals and more. Issued 2010.</p>
