Kitchen Prelude (Mes Métiers). Translated from the French by Dorothy Bolton.

Bookseller Notes

Scarce; the English edition of the author's memoirs of his early years as an apprentice ptissier in Paris, and as a chef at the Restaurant Marguery in Paris, at the Savoy and Bekeley Hotels in London, then at the Metropole in Brighton.An excellent insight, from a man with a clear literary sensibility, into the sometimes brutal internal workings behind such elegant facades. Hamp went on to be, among other things, a stationmaster at a French seaport and a factory inspector, all of which informed his literary realism - a contemporary reviewer called him 'the poet of jobs'.The dustjacket, by Gladys Hynes, is one of the artist's few forays into this medium - all for Constable. Hynes studied at the London School of Art with Nina Hamnett, with whom she enjoyed an enduring friendship; she worked at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops and lived with John Rodker and Mary Butts for a time - Rodker commissioned her illustrations for Ezra Pound's Cantos, which the poet admired.