OP: Old Waldorf Bar Days

Aventine Press, New York, 1931. Hardcover. Very Good. First printing.

This is a drink book and reminiscence published in 1931 by a newspaperman who was there at the old Waldorf—the one that opened in 1897—from the beginning and who, over the years, spent more hours “gathering material” than he cares to confess. 

Roughly half the book is a pre-Prohibition social history of the Big Brass Rail—the personalities, mores, memorable happenings, and seasonal events at the Waldorf’s legendary bar. The accounts are pointed and saturated with atmosphere. 

“There were times,” writes Crockett, “when crooks of many stripes would look upon the Waldorf as a happy hunting-ground. Everybody who stopped in the place was supposed to be bulging with money. Some were. Wire-tappers, green goods men, adventuresses, promoters of all sorts of worthless mines, sellers of ‘blue-sky’ literature, pickpockets, touters for ‘fancy houses,’ criminals of every class, just longed to get into that place…” 

The second half consists of recipes, some from the earliest days and, nearly all of them already venerable by the 1930s. Many are accompanied by etymologies, anecdotes and other paraphernalia. The cocktails range from the Gloom Lifter and the Baltimore Bracer to Rory O’ More. “Fancy Potations” include the Absinthe Frappe, Ping-Pong Punch, Murdock Fizz, and the Seawanhaka Yacht Club Cooler (named for the famed club at Oyster Bay, NY).

Published in New York by the Aventine Press, the book is a valued collectors’ item. This first printing copy, as with all printings, was issued without a dust jacket. The interior is clean and crisp, bearing only a very occasional stray mark or stain. The silver, clothbound cover is sharp with few blemishes. An uncommon find—and a satisfying one.