Why it matters

Evelyn's Acetaria is the first book in English devoted to salads, running through some 82 salad plants and the making of the dressing, and it is a central text of early English culinary and horticultural writing; it is catalogued as Wing E3480 / ESTC R8610 and was issued in 1699 alongside the ninth edition of the Kalendarium Hortense. John Evelyn was 79 when he published this, and it reads like the work of a man who had spent a lifetime in gardens and at the table and finally wanted to bring the two together. Evelyn catalogues some 82 plants, from the familiar (lettuce, cresses, radish) to the forgotten (alexanders, rampion, sow-thistle), and says when to gather them, how to wash them, and how to dress them, down to the oil, the vinegar, and the kind of knife that won’t taint the leaves. His governing idea is harmony: “every Plant should come in to bear its part, without being overpower’d by some Herb of a stronger Taste... like the Notes in Music.” He also wanders into whether humanity ate any meat before the Flood, making the book an early English argument for a mostly plant-based diet. It grew out of his vast, never-finished encyclopedia of gardening, and it’s the most personal fragment of it. A founding Fellow of the Royal Society and author of Sylva, Evelyn treated the kitchen garden as a serious subject. This copy is bound with his Kalendarium Hortense, the gardener’s almanac that tells you when to sow edible leaves.

Why we're looking

At US$485.28 this sits far below the only directly comparable copy we could confirm — a 1699 first edition in contemporary calf, 'Very Good', with folding table present, offered by Pazzo Books (ABAA/ILAB) at US$1,500. The gap is large enough to be interesting even allowing for the lower stated condition grade, which is precisely why the missing collation detail matters here.

Watch out for

The seller grades it only 'Good' and gives no collation or binding description at all, so the obvious question is what the price gap is paying for — rebinding, washing, repairs, or missing leaves. Library and dealer records for this edition call for a folding table, and an auction-catalogued copy was specifically noted as lacking the errata leaf, so ask the seller to confirm both are present and to describe the binding before bidding on the photographs alone.