The Magic of Herbs: A Modern Book of Secrets

First edition, first printing.  320pp, with portrait plate frontispiece (of Giambattista della Porta).  Green cloth-covered boards. gilt lettering on the spine. Deckled page edges.  8vo.  Cloth is marked all over and faded in margins, rubbed and rounded on corners and ends of a sunned and creased spine.  Text block edges dust darkened.  Some toning to free endpapers.  Some pencil annotations on front endpapers, including one noting that pages 50 and 62 have been bound in the wrong order, which is true.  A hint of toning to pages else internally neat. clean and tight. Hilda Wauton, who wrote under her married name of Mrs C F Leyel, was a botanist and leading herbalist and founder of the Society of Herbalists (now known as the Herb Society).  The Magic of Herbs was one of her earlier publications, and heavily informed by her studies of the work of Nicholas Culpepper, the 17th Century Herbalist.  A year after its publication she opened Culpepper House on Baker Street in London as a shop selling herbal medicines, food and cosmetics, which was both commercially successful and popular among society ladies of the interwar years, and the founding shop of what became a national chain.