Bookslut has a nice post in their February online magazine by Heather Smith who writes the “Judging a Book By Its Cover” column. This month she covers “Books About Eating”
She makes an interesting observation on the evolution of the food book market noting that they have gone from “books that were kind of eating porn, in which people traveled all over the world looking for the most perfect, exquisite loaf of bread, or the most tender baby sheep that charmingly scampers and gambols on the sun-dappled Tuscan hills and therefore is all the more delicious when it is cooked and served to the author at the end of the chapter” to basically “books about feedlots”.
She goes on to talk about the challenges book designers face in dealing with the new tastes in the market and how the design philosophy has gone from “soft beiges and maroons, out-of focus photographs of fruit, and calligraphic typefaces” to “the color red, and a whole lot of ’50s nostalgia.”
Now let’s talk about books we CAN eat!
The 3rd Annual Seattle Edible Book Festival will be held on April Fools Day. Every book in the exhibit is edible and I bet most of them actually taste pretty good.
For a taste here is a link to the 2006 entries and here are a couple of my favorites:
Dictionary by Amy Broomhall
and Catcher in the Rye by Julie Smith & Dave Strauss
and if you are on the east side of the mountains Whitman College will be hosting an Edible Book Tea Party on April 1st in the Olin Book Arts Lab. Now get cooking!