My most favourite things in life that bring me pleasure above all else, cherubic children not included- are food, books and art. Put those elements together in the form of twenty new titles from Penguin UK with covers designed by the divinely creative Coralie Bickford-Smith, and I might just die of happiness.
This new series of reissued classics, released last April in the UK and available this coming October in the US, are all based on the theme of ‘Great Food’.
Now while I might consider myself somewhat of a wannabe foody I do not in fact have a great collection of food books. I do have a fair selection of modern day cookbooks, I have everything Nigella Lawson has ever put out in print, paid some exorbitant price for a few Jamie Oliver books. I have a nice collection of baking books and Christmas edition food magazines going back to 1988 but I do not have many anthropological books on food.
That is about to change. Just as I have made it my life goal to collect every one of the Cloth Bound Penguin Classics Coralie has designed for Penguin, I too intend to collect these wee pretties.
Penguin have described their choice in titles as “…the sharpest, funniest, most delicious writing about food from the past 400 years.” 400 year old books on food! I’m so there.
Bickford-Smith has teamed up with clever lettering artist Stephen Raw for the covers and I have to say the scripts (or is it font?) are equally as delicious as the cover art which Coralie based on ceramic art from the time period in which the titles were penned in.
The first in my collection just has to be The Campaign for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton whom I have somewhat of a mild obsession with. In fact my Mrs Beeton books on Household Management and Mrs Beeton’s Christmas book are some of the very few vintage foody books I do have.
How gorgeous is that cover? The covers feature embossed lettering and selected areas of gilt and gloss to make the details in them pop. Apparently, though my eyes can’t see it on these images, they also have a special version of the Penguin logo where the little guy is holding a knife and fork- cute! Oh wait there he is in the lettering, it’s like eye spy.
I’m fairly certain that is also the same lettering that is used on her Christmas book, perhaps all her books. I’d love to find out more about the lettering.
Next on my covet list would have to be From Absinthe to Zest an Alphabet for food Lovers by Alexandre Dumas.
Who knew Alexandre Dumas wrote food books? Not I said the unread foody. According to wikipedia he was actually quite a prolific non-fiction writer and was both a gourmet and an expert cook. Thank you wikipedia.
I shall have to get this one for the title alone. Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B Toklas
‘In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day.
With dry wit and characteristic understatement Toklas ponders the ethics of killing a carp in her kitchen before stuffing it with chestnuts; decorating a fish to amuse Picasso at lunch; and travelling across France during the First World War in an old delivery truck, gathering local recipes along the way. She includes a friend’s playful recipe for ‘Haschiche Fudge’, which promises ‘brilliant storms of laughter and ecstatic reveries’, much like her book.’ -Goodreads
The cover Love in a Dish and other pieces by MFK Fisher was inspired from a pattern on this Century side plate by Eva Zeisel for Hallcraft in 1957.
In an incredibly insightful interview with Coralie Bickford-Smith at fastcompany.com about her creative process we get to see the ceramic bowl from which she took her artistic cues among an eclectic collage of what inspires her.
Like my kids collect Pokemon, I collect Coralie Bickford-Smith books and these little gems are fast becoming some of my favourites. Gotta catch ’em all!
You can see the other covers in the ‘great food’ range here