KUHN, Max.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

All Happy. First edition of this hospitality guide, inscribed on the prelim to "Walter H. Rounsevel, Head Waiter: It affords me great pleasure to present you with this volume" and signed by Milo M. Potter, a pioneering early Los Angeles hotelier.Potter (1854-1925), a Michigan-born hotelier active in California during the Gilded Age, managed the Hotel Wentworth and Van Nuys Hotel in Los Angeles before developing the vast Potter Hotel in Santa Barbara, opened in 1903 to cater to the growing tourist trade enabled by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Van Nuys Hotel is represented among the facsimile testimonial letters by another member of its staff. The recipient is likely Walter H. Rounsevel (1882-1974), who went on to a long career in western resort management, later associated with Feather River Inn and Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, where he became the long-serving general manager of one of the region's best-known luxury resorts.Issued to promote Kuhn's "Checking and Controlling System", which was designed to reduce accounting errors and fraud in hotels and restaurants, the work combines practical instruction with trade material relating to the American hospitality industry at the turn of the century. Included are specimen checks and forms, testimonial letters from leading hotels and restaurants, wage tables, recipes associated with the Waldorf-Astoria, seasonal food lists, advertisements, and directories of New York hotels, clubs, and restaurants.

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