I thought to myself, I'll just peek around. I definitely won't buy anything. I don't have room in my "cozy" (read: obscenely small) apartment for any more books.
Right. I don't know who the eff I thought I was kidding. But no matter, because I scored the loveliest little slip of a guide to "the art and pleasures of taking tea": The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea, complete with a note from a Ritz employee to a pair of dissatisfied customers. The book was presumably a token of amends. Even better: the dissatisfied customers in question were a Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Seriously.
Observe:
For the feeble-sighted, the above reads as follows:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bennet,
Please accept my most sincere apologies concerning your visit this weekend. I hope your wife will enjoy this jasmine tea for a long while! ☺Please have a safe trip back to New York and do not hesitate to contact me when making your reservation. Again my apologies.
Sincerely,
Erica Rhodes
And now to the book itself:
I love sassy books with formal overtones. Ladies of a certain disposition have a habit of writing such books; one of my faves is Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting Without Tears. In it, Zimmerman says,
Most people have an obsession; mine is knitting.…So please bear with me, and put up with my opinionated, nay, sometimes cantankerous attitude. I feel strongly about knitting.
Another is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, who, on the topic of "the difficulty of writing at all," asserts that
The stupid conclusion that if he cannot write easily he has mistaken his career is sheer nonsense.
A third is Miss Piggy's Guide to Life. In this admirable work, Miss Piggy offers this sage advice for the broken-hearted:
Only time can heal your broken heart, just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.
Books of this sort—and books with fine pen-and-ink drawings, and books with recipes and instructions sprinkled throughout, and books with letters and trinkets to pull out and examine, and books that come in sets, bound together in mysterious little boxes—are the most delightful of all books, especially to children. (Ahem. And childlike adults.) I used to pore through books of recipes and poetry, looking at all the words, but not really reading any of them, fingering pages with gilded edges or sweet drawings (so I thought at the time) of Precious Moments-esque lovers.
The Ritz Afternoon Tea book is very much this sort of book. It dedicates a great deal of text to the history and rituals of tea, and recipes are mixed into the narrative. I read every word, and some of the recipes look simple enough, though I may not ever try to make them. Helen Simpson, whose back-flap bio says that her Oxford thesis was called Unreasonable Laughter in Restoration Comedy, drops witty observations in the most unexpected places.
She describes a certain 1773 event as "an enormous fancy-dress tea party in Boston"; she decries "this century's mania for thinness"; she scoffs at the electric toaster, which "destroys the lyricism" of toasting bread; and of English muffins, she says, "Grown men become extremely emotional about them, especially over the matter of how they should be buttered."
Hee hee! I love it. And now…another cup of tea, I think.
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