Cuisine and Empire in Paperback

I returned from Europe to find the advance copy of the paperback of Cuisine and Empire waiting for me, ready to add to the hardback.  It’s a lovely chubby volume, nice to hold, and with the elegant layout that the University of California Press is so good at.

I can’t tell you how pleasing it is to have the paperback. Plenty of good reviews have already appeared so the nerve wracking worries that the book will be panned are over. The bad reviews that will doubtless appear can now be taken in stride. The worst of the typos, which creep in however meticulous the editing, have been caught and corrected. And since it’s only fifteen months since the hardcover hit the shelves, it’s a reassuring sign that the book is selling well.  So I’m doing a little dance!

If researching, writing, and publishing a book depends on a small army of individuals over and above the author, so does selling it.  I am so grateful to all who reviewed it in print or on the web, who invited me to give talks, who turned up to listen to those talks, who mentioned it to friends, who suggested it to book clubs, and, of course, who shelled out money to buy it.

I’d known about how important such help was but since my earlier books were more academic or more specialized, I hadn’t really appreciated just how important. My main New Year’s resolution is to do a great deal more in the future to review or mention others’ books.  All authors need all the help they can get.

And finally, let me just mention what a great bargain the paperback is. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon for $21.74, quite amazing for a 450 page book with 70 illustrations, 10 maps, and reams of notes and bibliography. Even the hard cover is only $33.77, not much more than the full price for the pb of $29.95.   Knowing Amazon, as soon as the pb is out in a week or two, they will raise the price.  Don’t say I haven’t warned you!

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