Lady Addle at Home

London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.. Good. 1945. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . (no dust jacket) [some wear and fading to cloth at base of spine, top corners bumped, light general wear, faint bookseller's rubber-stamped name on front pastedown (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach, Calif.)]. (B&W photographs) The second (of two) Lady Addle books, gently satirical faux memoirs in which the fictional Lady Blanche Addle (née Coot), daughter of the 13th Earl of Coot, gushingly details the utterly mundane details of her utterly uninteresting life as a member of the British upper crust, with the humor (and the book really is quite funny) arising from Lady A's obliviousness to her own pomposity. This volume is actually less a memoir than a compendium of Lady A's culinary and household tips, each one more ridiculous (and hilarious) than the next. (For all the fun-poking that's going on, though, there's a distinct undertone of stiff-upper-lip making-do-ness throughout, with numerous references to wartime food shortages and other deprivations, and recipes for things like "fishless fishcakes" (involving seaweed and cold cooked potatoes) and "marmalade without oranges or sugar.") The illustrations are genuine Victorian-era photographs, with an occasional bit of doctoring (to give The Princess Pansy of Splasche a lazy eye, for instance). .