Friday’s Find: Cookbooks and magic shelves

My husband had just heaved another box or two of cookbooks down from our loft - to put goodness knows where, as the bookshelves aren’t built yet - when Sarah Emily Duff tweeted some magical little films about bookshelves. How I wish these time-lapse fairies could weave their magic at our house.

Every food obsessive I know finds the siren song of cookbooks very hard to resist - not only do we use them in the kitchen (most of mine are battle-scarred, their pages stained and stuck together) but they are sitting on our bedside tables because we read them like novels. (I’m currently itching to jump into A History of Food in 100 Recipes by William Sitwell but I do try to steer myself in the direction of second-hand bookstores like The Crooked Book these days where there is lots of cook book bounty.)

Sales of cook books rising

But even as an avid cook book consumer, the volume and diversity of cook books published each year baffles me. I’m not thinking of those by high-profile authors with shows on the telly, but the comparatively insignificant, unheard of titles piled high on the sale table at my local Post Office, for example. Who buys them? According to Nielsen BookScan - loads of us. Although the overall volume of books sold in the UK has declined since the peak year of 2007, the volume of food and drink titles sold has grown over the past five years - 8.75 million of them in 2011. (Interestingly, or depressingly for those of us who work in the industry, the value of these sales has dipped, which means we are producing more for less).

Anyway, enough wittering. This is Friday’s Find. Whatever the state of your cook book library, enjoy this uplifting little film. I’m assured it’s not done through smoke and mirrors, but is the result of many sleepless nights rearranging shelves by a large posse of book lovers.