"In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day. With dry wit and characteristic understatement Toklas ponders the ethics of killing a carp in her kitchen before stuffing it with chestnuts, decorating a fish to amuse Picasso at lunch and travelling across France during the First World War in an old delivery truck..."
Here's Alice B. Toklas's "Murder in the Kitchen" from the new Penguin Great Food Series, the cover designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Despite the threat from the sinister Kindle, I happen to think that this country is enjoying a "golden age of book design", and I often unashamedly buy new books as much for the design of their dust-jackets or typography, as for their contents. The pleasure book-collecting has given me over the last few years has been immense, and you'll find that paperbacks such as these are not only eminently collectable, but also affordable too.
But I have a major quibble- and Penguin Books, I hope you're reading. Why-oh-why did you decide to issue this potentially marvellous series in abridged form? They're slim little critters, priced at seven golden nuggs a piece- and remind me of those freebie books you're given now and again with "The Times" or "The Daily Telegraph". I loved Colonel Wyvern's "Notes from Madras", and am now desperate to read more of it. A slim 78 or so pages ain't enough! Is this a form of dumbing down? Do Penguin think that buyers are incapable of reading the complete book?
