Notes on a Cellar-Book - Signed -
George Saintsbury
1921 - Macmillan & Co., London - Édition de Luxe. One of Five Hundred Signed Copies
Édition de Luxe, signed by Saintsbury and limited to 500 copies.
Since its first publication, the classic Notes on a Cellar-Book has remained one of the greatest tributes to drink and drinking in the literature of wine. A collection of tasting notes, menus, and robust opinions, the work is filled with anecdotes and recollections of wines and spirits consumed from the heights of Romanée-Conti to the simple pleasures of beer, flip, and mum.
‘Wine pleased my senses, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people’ – George Saintsbury.
‘Few wine books posses the iconic status of George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar-Book.’ – Wine Spectator.
‘As much a model for wine writing as . . . an historical document revealing how wines were once regarded and how times have changed’ – Bloomberg. ‘Writing in the 1920s, Saintsbury (1845-1933) was more than an avid drinker and collector; he was a legendary professor of literature in the British Isles, the author of something like 80 books and innumerable articles, and an unregenerate Tory who once staged a demonstration to keep classical Greek as a requirement for undergraduates. So when he pulled together these reflections on what he had recorded over the years about his alcoholic beverage inventory and how it had been consumed, he naturally sprinkled it with an amazing thicket of literary allusions, asides, quotations, things in quotations for no apparent reason, tirades against Prohibition in the US, and much, much more.’ - Vinography / Tim Patterson
‘In his mid-seventies, suffering from gout, rheumatism, failing eyesight and the falling-down dizziness of Ménière’s disease, Geroge Saintsbury had been for some time under doctors’ orders to limit his alcohol intake, at first of port and then of claret and Burgundy. It was in these circumstances that he signed a contract with Macmillan (which had brought out most of his recent literary criticism) to publish a book commenting on a ledger he had kept for about three decades. This ledger – an ordinary exercise book – was used to organise his wine cellar and to memorialise what had passed through it and, subsequently, through him.
The book about the ledger was an exercise in critical nostalgia. ‘All alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike,’ Saintsbury wrote. ‘It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.’ But now he could no longer drink like the heroic toper he once had been. Where, indeed, were the wines of yesteryear? Where were their memories? And where were the stout-hearted, free-spirited drinkers in a world besieged by ‘pussyfoots’, Saintsbury’s favourite term of abuse for American temperance campaigners and their British camp-followers? The instant success of Notes on a Cellar-Book on its appearance in 1920 took both author and publisher by surprise – a bittersweet exposure of their imperfect judgement of readers’ tastes.’ - London Review of Books / Steven Shapin.
Quarto (book size 22.8x18.5cm), pp. [2] xxxi [1] 227 [1]. In publisher’s purple cloth spine and cream paper covered boards, spine lettered in gilt. Condition: Fine in very good covers, toning to cream paper boards, with vary small chip to one edge, minor sunning to spine. Ref: 112568 Price: HK$ 5,000
Since its first publication, the classic Notes on a Cellar-Book has remained one of the greatest tributes to drink and drinking in the literature of wine. A collection of tasting notes, menus, and robust opinions, the work is filled with anecdotes and recollections of wines and spirits consumed from the heights of Romanée-Conti to the simple pleasures of beer, flip, and mum.
‘Wine pleased my senses, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people’ – George Saintsbury.
‘Few wine books posses the iconic status of George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar-Book.’ – Wine Spectator.
‘As much a model for wine writing as . . . an historical document revealing how wines were once regarded and how times have changed’ – Bloomberg. ‘Writing in the 1920s, Saintsbury (1845-1933) was more than an avid drinker and collector; he was a legendary professor of literature in the British Isles, the author of something like 80 books and innumerable articles, and an unregenerate Tory who once staged a demonstration to keep classical Greek as a requirement for undergraduates. So when he pulled together these reflections on what he had recorded over the years about his alcoholic beverage inventory and how it had been consumed, he naturally sprinkled it with an amazing thicket of literary allusions, asides, quotations, things in quotations for no apparent reason, tirades against Prohibition in the US, and much, much more.’ - Vinography / Tim Patterson
‘In his mid-seventies, suffering from gout, rheumatism, failing eyesight and the falling-down dizziness of Ménière’s disease, Geroge Saintsbury had been for some time under doctors’ orders to limit his alcohol intake, at first of port and then of claret and Burgundy. It was in these circumstances that he signed a contract with Macmillan (which had brought out most of his recent literary criticism) to publish a book commenting on a ledger he had kept for about three decades. This ledger – an ordinary exercise book – was used to organise his wine cellar and to memorialise what had passed through it and, subsequently, through him.
The book about the ledger was an exercise in critical nostalgia. ‘All alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike,’ Saintsbury wrote. ‘It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.’ But now he could no longer drink like the heroic toper he once had been. Where, indeed, were the wines of yesteryear? Where were their memories? And where were the stout-hearted, free-spirited drinkers in a world besieged by ‘pussyfoots’, Saintsbury’s favourite term of abuse for American temperance campaigners and their British camp-followers? The instant success of Notes on a Cellar-Book on its appearance in 1920 took both author and publisher by surprise – a bittersweet exposure of their imperfect judgement of readers’ tastes.’ - London Review of Books / Steven Shapin.
Quarto (book size 22.8x18.5cm), pp. [2] xxxi [1] 227 [1]. In publisher’s purple cloth spine and cream paper covered boards, spine lettered in gilt. Condition: Fine in very good covers, toning to cream paper boards, with vary small chip to one edge, minor sunning to spine. Ref: 112568 Price: HK$ 5,000