Avis devoto (1 Ergebnisse)

First edition of Chiang Yee's affectionate portrait of Boston, an exceptional association copy inscribed by Avis DeVoto and given to Julia and Paul Child. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated by the author with color plates and line drawings. Inscribed on the front free endpaper, "In anticipation of your return - Avis, Christmas 1959." Avis DeVoto, the wife of the historian Bernard DeVoto, was Julia Child's closest American friend and confidante. Their friendship began when Julia wrote to Bernard in praise of an article he had published in Harper's on the sorry state of American kitchen knives, and Avis answered the letter herself. The correspondence that followed ran for years. It was Avis who championed the vast manuscript that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking and carried it to American publishers, and her role in the friendship was dramatized by Sally Field in the film Julie and Julia. This copy was sent to the Childs while Paul was posted to Oslo, in anticipation of his retirement and their return to the United States, when they settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be near Avis. Fine in a very good dust jacket with light toning and a small closed tear to the rear panel. Accompanied by a letter of provenance from the previous bookseller recording that the book came from Paul and Julia Child's library, acquired en bloc by Julia's niece Patricia McWilliams and passed with her stock. Chiang Yee (1903-1977) was a Chinese poet, painter, calligrapher, and travel writer who left China in 1933 and settled in London, where he began the celebrated series of illustrated travel books he published under the name The Silent Traveller. Written in English and illustrated with his own paintings in the Chinese manner, the volumes carried him from the Lakeland fells and wartime London to Oxford, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York, and, in this volume of 1959, to Boston. His gentle, observant essays, which look at Western cities through a Chinese sensibility, made him one of the most widely read Chinese authors in the English-speaking world. The Silent Traveller in Boston is dedicated to Walter Muir Whitehill, the director of the Boston Athenaeum, and records Chiang's wanderings on the Common, along the Charles, and through the city's streets and seasons.…