I've heard book
collecting is a neurosis, but all collectors, of everything
from
little silver souvenir spoons to juke boxes of the Benny
Goodman era,
function outside the bounds of logic as they assemble the
bits and
pieces of whatever arcana fuels their addiction.
Neuroses are odd
because
many would succumb to mild psychiatric treatment, yet most
of us
choose to endure that part of our psyche that has elected to
play the
game of life slightly out of bounds.
Last month I
described a
great old cookbook I purchased because it had three banks of
indexed,
tabbed thumb notches. There were murmurs from a reader or
two that
boiled down to, “Seriously”?
Well, it gets
better.
Book collecting can include any number of permutations.
There are
collections of poets and authors, first editions and signed
copies,
finely bound volumes of the 16th century and
lurid
paperback covers from the 1940s. Actually most collectors
I've met
have multiple categories they gladly accumulate for reasons
only they
could reveal.
So yes I do have
a
cookbook collection. My oldest date from the late 19th
century, many titled as receipt
books, the evolution of which came to be known as
recipe books.
Copies of the Dr. Chase's Receipt Book: Or
Information for Everybody were
printed and bound on the corner of Main Street and Miller
in Ann
Arbor and contained everything from baby foods to prevent
colic to
common kitchen cures for farm animals. Dr. Chase and his
steam
powered presses began the book printing industry in Ann
Arbor, no
matter what a certain Ann Arbor book printer claims.
But age doesn't
drive my
love of cookbooks. Having produced hundreds of cookbooks I
know that
the publishers are concerned and involved with the design
and
production of the book itself, more so than the editors of
novels or
technical books. There's cover art to catch the eye, binding
to lay
flat on the counter or elegant on the shelf, sized large
enough to
allow lavish graphics or small enough for a crowded drawer.
And maybe sometimes
the
recipes themselves shine. Why else have a copy of Famous
Cape Cod
Recipes (1944) if not for the instructions to make
Ginger Ale
Souffle?
I have an undated
copy
of Our Daily Bread from the Eastern Maine General
Hospital
Women's Auxiliary which proudly features a silk screened
cover by
Frank Hamabe of Bluehill, Maine with ink so thick and shiny
on the
front cover you'd think it had been enameled. As silk screen
adds a
bit of cost to a book's production, the good women of the Auxiliary
must have believed their shiny red and blue cover would
surely catch
the browser's eye, and it did mine.
Leave it to the
photographers at Life magazine to produce this over-sized
edition of Picture Cook Book
at a full 10 ¼ x 13 3/4”. The interior
photographs are what you would expect from a team of Life
photographers and printed on a heavy Mead dull enamel
arranged in
sections throughout the book, printed by Livermore &
Knight Co.
of Providence Rhode Island while the text was letter-pressed
on
uncoated stock by Rogers Kellogg Corporation, Long Island
City, New
York. The plastic comb binding, which survives intact after
over 60
years of use, was by Spiral Binding, Inc. of Paterson, New
Jersey.
Who could resist
the
snazzy little Hotpoint people dressed
In 1941, The
Three
Mountaineers, Inc. of Asheville, N.C. decided their book of
There's also the
1916
edition of Manual for Army Bakers, a 1905 edition of
A
Little Cook-Book for a Little-Girl, and a 1967 edition
of KOA
(Denver) radio's Hello Neighbor, a collection of
phoned in
recipes from the morning show, Hello Neighbor. Each title is an
example of the
divergent roles and audiences cookbooks address.
Like most
neurosis, once
revealed and explained, they are excruciatingly banal and
benign.
Because I still
work
extensively with smaller, newer publishers I expect a lot of
“How
do I...” questions. Can I use Garamond on the title page? Do
I need
an LCC number? Should the dedication go on the left or the
right? Can
I start the book with a blank page?
Beginning
publishers
seem to believe that there's a secret publishing manual
somewhere and
if they perhaps use a display type face for the title page,
they may
be breaking some hard and fast rule in the secret book and
they will
be forever marked as amateurs. They don't believe me when I
tell them
it's their book and they can produce it however they like.
Cookbook people
are
different. They have a strong sense of how to format their
book right
from the start, which is probably why I like accumulating
their
books. They are not bound by any traditional sense of book
design so
they approach the design and production as a blank slate and
they
have a boxful of chalk.
It's a refreshing
and
extremely welcome approach to making books and I enjoy
collecting
them as much as making them.
Just in
Time for Banned Book Week
A
Tennessee mother has called for a 59,000 student school
district to ban the book The Immortal Life
of Henrietta Lacks. The novel recounts how
human cells from a hospital patient were able to survive in a lab in
1951. The
social and moral complications that arose are presented in the novel.
Amazon
Monopolizes German Audio Books
While
Americans are asked to believe there is such a thing as an
unregulated, benevolent monopoly, German
booksellers know better and have asked the European Commission to
investigate Amazon's (and its wholly owned subsidiary, Audible)
control over 90% of the German audio book market.
McGraw
Hill Education Going Public
After
years of extreme profitability selling required textbooks to
impoverished students, McGraw Hill Education hopes
to raise $100 million to figure out how to do the same digitally
by issuing and selling stock to the public.
Tattered
Cover Sold
Denver's
iconic Tattered Cover bookstore is
being sold. The forty some year old store flourished under the
founder's focus on providing a bookstore that uniquely understood its
customers' needs.
If It
Worked Then, Try It Now
Many
years ago a publisher told me that most bookstores depend on non-book
sales for about 60% of their revenue. In that spirit, publisher
EverAfter Romance is adding a line of “romantic”
products to sell on its web-site.
Oyster
Closes
In
the February 2014 newsletter we reported that the Oyster ebook
subscription service had already reached 100,000 titles available for
rent at $9.95 monthly. Oyster is going out of business with pundits
proclaiming it was a great business model that Oyster simply
mishandled, ignoring the elephant
in the room, Amazon's Kindle Unlimited.
eBook
Sales Falling, Paperback Sales Grow
While
ebook sales have turned from stagnant in 2014 to dropping
10% through first five months of 2015, paperbacks
sales grew 8.6% through the first quarter of the year.
B&N's
Long Path to Recovery
Another
glimmer of hope as Barnes&Noble cut
losses year over year, even as revenue shrank 1.5% due to
flagging digital sales.
Papal Rush
Job
In
order to present Pope Francis with a bound remembrance of his trip to
New York, the Archdiocese of New York selected
Luke's Copy Shop on Staten Island to produce the full color 190
page wire bound volume in 24 hours.
Literary
Taverns
From
Tolkein to Dostoevsky, Pound to Joyce, literary giants had their
favorite watering holes. Here are seven
still operating taverns that enjoyed the company of numerous
scribes.
Video Book
Trailers
I
had no idea that in order to get even a smidgen of cyber recognition,
videos teasing the story of your story
on YouTube are requisite, just as a few years ago setting up a
MySpace page for your title was the only
way your book would be noticed.
Final
Thought
Banned
Book Week Edition
“All these people
talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values.
Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those
old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good
old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution
of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me
knowledge or give me death!”
Kurt Vonnegut
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