Are cookbooks a thing of the past?
This I don’t know.
But recently I pulled my mother’s 1963 edition of Joy of Cooking off the shelf as I do whenever I want to plan a traditional meal. The robin’s-egg blue cover is always easy to see. I grabbed it and the book careened out of my hand to the floor.
Rrrrrrrrip. Binding broke through.
There lay 830 pages still held together by a string. By the strings of the loyal sewn binding.
If the cookbook was opened an average of 3 days a week for its first 20 years, that’s 3,120 openings of the book. And then averaging once a week for the next 40 years, that’s 2,080 openings. In its lifetime of 5,200 openings, I reckon it held up beautifully.
It has lasted 60 years! And that’s a book with very heavy traffic. Can we say the same for our paperback books, textbooks, hardcover books, or even eBooks, with their ever-changing digital platforms? Unlikely.
If you have a book project and are contemplating the variety of bindings, spend the extra cash on a sewn binding. Your children or grandchildren (or great-grandchildren) will thank you some day.
My late mother’s handwritten recipes for Apple Crisp and Meat Loaf, c. 1965