How to Cook a Hippopotamus

This short anthology gathers pieces of quaint and curious advice from older manuals, essays, and household books. The extracts tell the reader how to choose a spouse, how to avoid work, how to visit an old English inn, how to cultivate a magnetic gaze, how to amuse children, how to rough it, and how to defend oneself against a mad dog, among other tasks. Cooking a hippopotamus is the joke in the title, not the subject of a recipe chapter. Pindar arranges the snippets as a comic cabinet of forgotten instruction rather than as a practical handbook. The volume is a selection of historical how-to prose, lightly framed, not an original treatise.

Bound in illustrated dark purple plasticised paper boards with silver lettering and colour design on front cover. No slipcase.