A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen
OR The Art of Preserving, Conserving, and Candying. With the Manner how to make divers kinds of Sirups, and all kind of banqueting stuffes.Also divers soveraigne Medi-cines and Salves for Sunday Diseases. LONDON. Printed by John Haviland. 1635. Bound with -- DELIGHTS FOR LADIES, TO ADORNE THEIR Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories WITH Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes, And Waters. reade, practise, and censure. LONDON, Printed by R.Y. and are to be sold by James Boler. 1635.
12mo. Pp. Title Page with latticed border. All pages unnumbered. Fully bound in modern dark brown calf with 17th century style blind tooling on boards and spine. -- THE 2ND PART; Pp. Title page. 4 pp Epistle, a poem signed by H. Plat. 13 pp of 'The Table' all without borders. This second work is divided into four parts; The first of which is 'The Art of Preserving, Conserving, Candying etc'. Next 'Secrets in Distillation'. Next 'Cookery and Huswifery'. Finally 'Sweet Powders, Oyntments, Beauties etc'. All pages unnumbered. All text pages of both parts surrounded by intricate latticed borders. A very nice clean copy with minimal aging. The title page slightly dusty. A rare item especially in this fine condition..
- Elizabethan and Jacobean London was the home of Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1611), a gentleman of varied interests. As a Londoner trying to make his way in the world, and very much a man of his time and place, he was known as an author, alchemist, speculator and inventor whose career touched on the fields of alchemy, general scientific curiosity, cookery and sugar work, cosmetics, gardening and agriculture, food manufacture, victualling, supplies and marketing. Unlike many of his colleagues and correspondents, much of his manuscript material, in the form of notebooks and papers, has survived. Not much, however, is known of his personal life and among his manuscripts there are few letters, diaries or other private materials. Plat had such a wide range of interests that modern scholars have tended to concentrate on that aspect of his work that most affects their own research. Most recently he has fallen amongst historians of science and while they have carefully examined his written and published works they have, in some cases, interpreted almost all that he wrote as a quest for scientific knowledge, in the same way that the gardening writers thought him primarily a gardener or the cookery writers treated his cookery book as his most important work. Our interest here is definitely the latter. This edition of 1635 not in Cagle, Oxford, Bitting, Vicaire or Hazlitt. Most have the 1636 edition. The BL also lacks the 1635 edition, but the STC of Pollard & Redgrave cites the 1635 edition of both parts. Bent Juel- Jensen writing about the second part only in ‘Some Uncollected Authors XIX, The Book Collector” states -- “The reader is left in no sort of doubt about what went on in the Elizabethan kitchen, and few could put the book down without some regret for the passing of those most leisurely days. ... It is not surprising that some of these have survived in single copies only, and some have probably disappeared altogether ... Most surviving copies are pretty grubby and often incomplete.” A 1615 copy of 'DELIGHTS FOR LADIES' only, was offered at the 59th New York Book Fair for $9750.oo. This copy however is in unusually good condition and with the both parts present.
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Antiquarian category
ref number:
10914