Description
[Applewood Books], [No date: circa 2001]. Hardcover, 42 pp. plus two publisher's advertisement leaves; 23 cm; text in Creole, French and English; facsimile reprint of the 1885 Will H. Coleman edition.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
111
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition, no dust jacket. Blue-green cloth over boards reproducing the original binding: two gold crescent moons lettered GOMBO and ZHEBES in black, facing each other across a band of silver waves, paired black rules at head and foot. Mild shelf and edge wear. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Carries no imprint, date or ISBN of its own, reproducing the 1885 Coleman title page and copyright notice and nothing further, which is why copies turn up catalogued as the 1885 original. The cloth facsimile is attributed in the trade to Applewood Books of Bedford, Massachusetts, a house founded in 1976 to reissue American titles in facsimile; nothing printed in the book states a publisher. Hearn assembled 352 proverbs drawn from six Creole dialects, Louisiana, Haiti, Martinique, Trinidad, French Guiana and Mauritius, giving each in Creole, then French, then English, with notes on idiom, etymology and usage. He collected close to five hundred and cut them down for publication. The Louisiana proverbs came largely from Professor William Henry of the Jefferson Academy in New Orleans; the Haitian selection came by permission of Harper Bros. from John Bigelow's 1875 articles. Title means herb gumbo, the version made with greens rather than okra, which Hearn takes in his introduction as a figure for the mixture. Rear advertisement leaves for La Cuisine Creole, long attributed to Hearn, and the Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans, both Coleman books.