Food for Beauty

Helena Rubinstein. Illustrations by Robert L. Leonard.

New York. Ives Washburn. 1938. First edition, third printing, December 1938 (first printing, November 1938). Cloth-bound hardback, dust jacket. 245 pages. Jacket design and green monochrome illustrations by Robert L. Leonard. 210 x 135mm (8¼ x 5¼"). 0.55kg. . English. Very good, in good dust jacket; fragile jacket is rubbed along edges, with some tearing and loss along folds, a few small chips along top and bottom edges, very small hole to front cover, light staining to verso of jacket, not price-clipped; some slight wear and bumping to boards, slight lean to spine, original book receipt taped onto title-page with 1cm of tape.

Helena Rubinstein's recipe and diet book promoting healthy eating as the basis of beauty. Rubinstein visited the Bircher-Benner Sanatorium in Zurich in the 1930s. She was an enthusiastic convert to the Bircher-Benner method, a diet of raw fruit and vegetables, nuts and whole cereals. She set up the New York Health Bar and Zurich Room as a laboratory to test her own recipes tailored for the American market. Food for Thought is the result of these experiments, presenting a series of recipes centred on fruit and vegetables and Rubinstein's own theory of beauty through diet. The book ends with diagrams for supportive daily exercises.