Description

[004227] Simmons, Owen. The Book of Bread. London: Maclaren & Sons. First Edition. 4to. Hardback. Good+ / No Jacket (as Issued?) [7], 8-360pp, n.d. but 1903. Original cloth, title blocked in black to spine and in gilt to upper cover, bevelled boards, patterned endpapers

Slightly rubbed to extremities and upper portion of spine, couple of minor scrapes to lower board. Internally lightly browned, but generally quite clean, signature C with a small piece of upper left hand corner of pages missing (not affecting text). The photographs often with small fold / crease marks to corners and edges (as often). Bookplate of former owner to front pastedown (Edward Braxton Reynolds)

With twelve chromolithographic plates, ten tipped in photographic plates, two of which are silver bromide prints, and three photographic illustrations to text

Bitting, page 435; Parr and Badger I:56, noting that The Book of Bread “is one of those rare books that can be judged by its cover, or rather, by its name. It is, as the title says, a book about bread … A monograph about the manufacture of bread, it is the bread-maker’s bread book … Here at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the humblest, yet most essential of objects is catalogued as precisely, rigorously and objectively as any work by a 1980s Conceptual artist”