Prospect Books was founded by the late Alan Davidson and his wife, Jane Davidson in 1979, at the same time as their journal of food history Petits Propos Culinaires. Since 1993, Prospect Books has been owned by Tom Jaine (pictured here), Petits Propos Culinaires following it to Devon in the year 2000. Prospect Books continues to publish only books about cookery, food history and the ethnology of food. It is one of the very few British publishers to specialise in this field and produces four to eight books a year. Petits Propos Culinaires is published three times a year and contains articles, sometimes extracts from books or reprints, as well as reviews of current publications. More information is obtainable elsewhere on the site.
I reproduce here a two-part article by the late Alan Davidson describing the activities of Prospect Books and PPC from the time of its foundation in 1979. I have not included any of the illustrations in the articles. The originals can be found in PPC 47 and 48 of 1994.
mp3 sound bite of Tom Jaine on writing
about food
works with later editions of browsers with mp3 plugin
Profile of Tom Jaine in The Telegraph
Text of a lecture Tom Jaine gave at Oxford on
RECIPES AND SOURCES OF INFORMATION IN FOOD HISTORY
The text of a bibliographic article written by Tom Jaine for the Year Book of the Erasmus Foundation
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